The Away Weekend

A portrait of George Washington painted before
the Revolutionary War by Charles Willson Peale.

We boarded Trooper and Max, got the housesitter in to stay with the others and Clay and I went on a weekend getaway. It was a beer festival called Microfestivus in Roanoke that was the impetus for the trip, but I wanted to see a few other places and things that we can't do with a car full of dogs along on the trip.


The first stop was Lexington, VA to see the Washington & Lee campus and the graves of Robert E. Lee and his horse traveler. The campus is beautiful, all red brick and white columns, very Jeffersonian. W&L's beautiful campus is a stark contrast to the adjacent, butt-ugly campus of the Virginia Military Institute.

The interior of the chapel.

A few years back they removed the battle flags and confederate veneration from Lee's tomb and it's now quite tasteful and appropriate. They give a short but very interesting tour of the chapel and then let you tour the museum downstairs on your own. There a few interesting and significant works of art in that small space.

We didn't stay long in Lexington but I'd like to go back sometime to see Stonewall Jackson's home and to eat at the Red Hen.

Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington.

Robert E. Lee as a young man. I had never
seen this image.

Traveler's gravesite

Next it was on to Roanoke to take in the Microfestivus beer festival. It was a good one, in downtown Roanoke spread out over several blocks of the downtown area. There were 200 breweries, I believe, made up of a nice mix of local, regional, and nationally known craft beers. Each brewery was pouring samples of just two or three of their brews and it wasn't the IPA hop-fest that so many beer festivals seem to be. There were a decent number of sours, goses, and still plenty of IPAs. It was a good mix of styles as well as breweries.

The reason I had agreed to go this festival when Clay initially proposed it was because I wanted to stay at the Hotel Roanoke. It's an old railroad hotel, built in 1882 and still adjacent to the city's railroad tracks. There is also an art museum and a transportation museum nearby, which are other reasons to make a return visit to Roanoke, which has a nice downtown area.

On Sunday morning we headed back via Bedford, a pretty much nothing little town that no one would visit but for the fact that it's the home of the National D-Day Memorial. I'm not really interested in war stuff but it was something I'd heard about, we were in the area, and I wouldn't otherwise make a special trip to see it. We took the tour, and I'm glad we did, and it was pretty interesting. It looks a bit like it was designed by committee, and I expect it was. The sculptural elements were quite good, but some parts of the overall design worked better than others.

The Bedford County courthouse

There's was also a brewery in Bedford that we wanted to hit, Beale's. It was quite good and I was regretting our big breakfast because the food there (house-smoked meats) smelled wonderful. The brewery was located in part of an old textile mill. The footrest at the bar was a railroad rail that ran the length of the very long, copper-covered bar. I don't know what they will do when Trump brings back all those textile manufacturing jobs from overseas. While the rest of Bedford seemed mired in WWII, Beale's was geared to a much younger generation and seemed to be promoting biking, hiking, and running trails in the area, which isn't far from the Peaks of Otter in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

A rather narrow and primitive gravel road leads
to Poplar Forest, and unlike Monticello, you can
drive up and park very close to it.

At the other end of Bedford County is the town of Forest, and just outside that is Thomas Jefferson's other home, Poplar Forest. We had visited Poplar Forest many years ago, probably 15-20 years ago. It was still undergoing restoration now, but it's much further along. Again, we took the tour and it was interesting and informative, given by a second year UVA student who must be from that area.

The south side features a sunken garden, or yard really, there
is no garden at this point. I don't know if there ever was.
Jefferson never finished work on the house.

The house is octagonal in shape and the chosen dinnerware is too. 

The kitchen

The house had burned so only some of the
brickwork is original, and this door, which was
saved because the then-current residents used
it to carry out their belongings during the fire.

This is the north portico, the "front" door. They are in the process
of restoring the circular drive out front. Something to see next time.

We hit one more brewery on the way home, Loose Shoe, in Amherst. The owner/brewer is also a farrier. The logo, decor, and all the beer names are horse-related. I had a pint of Tally-Ho, an E.S.B.