We also added lots more pics to our Picasa web album for this trip.
Sunday we continued our trek northward into Virginia. First stop was lunch at the Galax Smokehouse on the main street in Galax VA. Kris had the pulled pork with a side of slaw and smoked mashed potatoes. Unfortunately they were totally sold out of ribs so Brian settled for the boneless rib ends with slaw and a whole smoked potato. Absolutely delicious. We are going to have to try the smoked potatoes in our smoker when we get home. Wandering around the downtown area we saw many posters for festivals, concerts and other musical events. This one looked like it would be a lot of fun but we have a date with the Pittsburgh Pirates on Memorial Day weekend...
Many towns/cities we drive through have some sort of theme sculptures on display. In Calgary they had the "painted cows". Here they have large "painted fiddles" on display around town...
Leaving Galax we drove about an hour north to the town of Floyd where, in the Floyd Country Store (sort of an old fashioned general store), they have free music jam sessions on Sunday afternoons. On this day we sat and listened, for about two hours, to 15 musicians (banjos, fiddles, mandolins, guitars) play traditional mountain music...
Later in the afternoon the jam sessions were more blue grass specific but it was getting a bit late and we had to be on our way to our planned stop at the KOA in Fancy Gap for the night. On the way to Fancy Gap we ran into a really heavy rain storm but luck was with us, it skipped past Fancy Gap and we were dry there.
After getting set up at the KOA we drove up the road to the local Dollar General to see what we might pick up for a light dinner (the lunch in Galax was pretty well most of what we needed for the day). This is the first Dollar General we have been in but we have seen these Dollar General stores all over the south and in many small communities it is the only "grocery" store we see. It is the only store within about 30 kms of Fancy Gap. It is actually a bit sad because these stores carry no fresh fruit or vegetables. On this day the three people in front of us had nothing but junk food (literally Twinkies and the like) in their baskets. We found a package of sliced ham that we used to augment a light dinner of tomatoes and broccoli that we had left over.
Monday we continued north veering a little eastward as we headed for Appomattox Court House where General Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant, ending the Civil War (although fighting went on for a couple more months). The surrender took place in the McLean house...
Although most of the buildings at Appomattox Court House are original from the Civil War era, the McLean house is one that had to be rebuilt. We asked the Ranger/Docent at the house why it was not kept up in it's original form. He related this story....A number of years after the end of the war, a private company bought the house and totally dismantled it with the intent of taking it to Washington. Unfortunately the company went bankrupt and the dismantled house sat as a pile of lumber and bricks on the road, in front of the original property, for the next 50 years and slowly disappeared as local farmers, collectors and nature itself took away bits and pieces as they needed them. The remaining bits of bricks etc were finally salvaged, the house was rebuilt and is apparently a very accurate reconstruction of the original house. A few original furnishings but mostly other period furniture placed quite appropriately, for historical accuracy, to depict where both Lee and Grant sat in the parlor.
Talking with the Ranger about this past April being the 150th anniversary of the surrender we asked what celebrations they had. April 8-12th they had re-enactments etc. Over 24,000 people visited the park with well over 18,000 coming through the McLean house. Wow... he said it was way beyond busy, bordering on insanity. Sorta glad we visited at this time when there were only 3 other people and us.
Anyway, a number of neat original buildings in the park include the general store, a law office and a tavern where, over the course of a few days, the Federals set up a printing press and printed 30,000 parole forms for the Confederate army soldiers to carry with them to guarantee passage and free transportation back to their homes and farms...
As an aside, the little town of Appomattox itself has little to offer. In the early evening we attempted to search out a restaurant. The best we could do was a Pizza Hut. There is one main street cafe and one "fancy" restaurant but both were closed.
Monday night we stayed at the Paradise Lake RV park a few kms out of town. Nice location but the washrooms were pretty disgusting. Sometimes we do understand why people like to have their own washrooms in their RVs. Lucky for us the well maintained, clean ones far outnumber the bad.
Tuesday morning we returned to the National Park for another couple of hours. The visitors center has an excellent museum with film clips etc etc. To boot, it was a beautiful sunny morning, perfect for a bit of sketching. Our last stop at Appomattox Court House was the little Confederate Cemetery at the entrance to the park...
A bit before noon we headed off towards Winchester Virginia, our planned stop for the night. After a stop at Starbucks in Lynchburg we headed north across the Blue Ridge mountains into the Shenendoah Valley. We stopped in Harrisonburg for a visit to the Virginia Quilt Museum with it's fabulous displays of period quilts (no photos allowed though)...
... followed by an excellent lunch of artichoke/cheddar soup followed by salad with grilled salmon for Kris and a bacon cheese hamburger with a black eyed peas salad for Brian at Clementine on Main Street. Man, that was good! It would have been cool to stay in Harrisonburg through next weekend as James Madison University plays host to the NCAA Regional Women's Softball Championships but we have to stay focused... Pirates await in Pittsburgh. On our trip through this area a few years ago we drove north to Winchester on US-11. Nice drive through beautiful scenery but quite slow as it took a couple of hours to get to Winchester. This time we opted to hop onto I-81 where it was a much quicker drive of about an hour helping to make sure we arrived early enough to take a good dip in the pool at the Candy Hill Campground just outside the city. The pool was nice and cool (some might say cold) and we had it all to ourselves :-)
Wednesday was a shorter driving day taking us to Gettysburg Pennsylvania. As we neared Gettysburg our trusty GPS decided we should take a few small country roads to get to the Gettysburg Campground just south of town. This is a beautiful campground with about 200 sites. They are expecting to be packed full for the Memorial Day weekend (ie starting tomorrow) but today is practically empty, except for one wee trailer...
After getting set up we drove into Gettysburg for some lunch and to have a look around. For lunch we stopped at the Cafe Saint Amand, a French bistro (yes, we know... not much Civil War authenticity there, but it reminded us of last year in Paris). A nice Salade Nicoise for Kris and the Croque Madame for Brian was pretty good but a bit heavy on the Dijon mustard :-( After lunch we drove around a bit and found it hard to believe how much has changed since we visited here some 30 years ago. The town must have building standards ensuring that any new building in the central core area is in the style of the Civil War era as it is much more built up now. You can still identify original Civil War era buildings though because they have plaques identifying them as such...
Later at the Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum and visitors center, we bought a ticket package that included the film "A New Birth of Freedom" narrated by Morgan Freeman and explains the Battle at Gettysburg and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The second part of the ticket package was the Cyclorama Painting, a massive painting originally displayed in 1884 (much restored now) that surrounds the visitor with the fury of Pickett's Charge, the decisive struggle of the three day war and possibly the mistake that cost General Lee the overall war. Both the film and the Cyclorama are excellent and well worth seeing. Our ticket package also included museum entrance and a bus tour of the battlefield area itself but those are for tomorrow.
Wednesday we decided to start off with a breakfast at the historic Gettysburg Hotel before heading back to the visitor center. Our bus tour started at 12:30 PM and lasted 2 hours. Excellent tour with the docent providing detailed descriptions of troop placements, tactics and strategies used during the 3 day battle. After the bus tour we used the last of our ticket package to visit the museum. This too is just excellent. One of the most poignant displays, highlighting Gettysburg and Civil War battle statistics is at the entrance to the museum...
That was an excellent two days at Gettysburg. To finish off Thursday we stopped in at the Pub & Restaurant tavern, on Lincoln Square for some wine and wings. Arriving back at the campground we found we were totally surrounded by other trailers and RVS. The place was packed and it wasn't even Friday yet. Spoke to one couple who live only a few years away but this place is their Memorial Day Weekend getaway and they have reserves the same spots for many years for a family gathering.
Friday morning just after leaving the campground we drove down Black Horse Tavern Road where we passed an old small cemetery that we thought was interesting. Going into the small, well maintained, cemetery we discovered it was a Revolutionary War era cemetery with maybe a couple of dozen graves. We found a couple of headstones that were barely readable, one of which showed the person passed on "27th of December 1772 aged 60 years". Another indicated "she was 88 years old". Several graves have had a Revolutionary War marker placed beside them ...
It was a fairly long drive to Pittsburgh so we opted to do part of it on the Pennsylvania Pike and paid a toll of $12.50, but it cut off nearly an hour of driving time. We booked into the Washington, Pennsylvania KOA, about 35 minutes south of Pittsburgh, for the Memorial Day weekend. We are normally a bit cautious about KOA's on long weekends but this one turns out to be quite small and is on quite a hill so we suspect that any kids that are here get tired out pretty quickly going up and down the hill. It is actually quite quiet.
Saturday was ballgame day. We headed into Pittsburgh late morning in order to have time for a lunch before heading to the ball park early in an attempt to score a bobble head doll. Today's game featured Josh Harrison (3rd baseman for the Pirates) bobble head doll for the first 20,000 fans. We thought we could spend a bit of time wandering around downtown Pittsburgh but it, in our opinion, does not have a particularly friendly street presence. Relatively narrow sidewalks with few plazas so it feels like you are walking amongst deep canyon walls. Some beautiful buildings, that we later saw from the ball park, were difficult to see from street level.
Anyway, walking across the Roberto Clemente bridge from downtown you get a great view of PNC Park...
... and from our seats up behind home plate we had a great view back across the bridge towards downtown....
The game was a sellout so the place was packed. Our home team mojo helped the Pirates make the home town fans go away happy as the Pirates never trailed the Mets in an 8-2 win with A.J. Burnett getting the win and improving his pitching record to 4-1 on the season while Mets ace Matt Harvey saw his record fall to 5-2. There were 3 dingers, 2 by the Pirates (McCutchen and Alvarez) and one by the Mets (Tejada). We did end up scoring a couple of Josh Harrison bobble heads...
...along with a few other giveaways, the first was a coupon, for every fan, for a free Denny's Grand Slam breakfast due to a Pirate hitting a home run in the second inning, the second was a free chicken sandwich, with your game ticket, at an area Chick-fil-A, due to the Pirates pulling off a double play in the third inning and the last was a free iced drink at any Dunkin Donuts due to the Pirates scoring at least 5 runs. We'll see what we make of the free food items.
The Pirates Charities hold a 50-50 raffle every game and with the sellout crowd the announced total sales for this game was over $30,000. Some lucky fan, and darn, it was not us, went home with a cool $15,000. How nice would that be to win!!!
It seems that every park has some kind of mascot race and in Pittsburgh it is the Perogy Race. It was fun to watch and had the whole place cheering. FUN...
PNC park was Major League Baseball park number 20, only 10 more to go, next up is Philadelphia...
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