Appalachian Trail

It is famous for requiring huge sacrifices from humans who imagine they can walk 2200 miles in a summer.


A colleague of mine aspires to be a through hiker on the AT as it is known. My idea of a hike is an hour spent ambling along the crest of the mountain, watching my elderly yellow Labrador get her day's fun from unfamiliar woods and smells.


We stopped by at dawn, fifteen minutes from the urban chaos of Roanoke, Virginia, and we watched the sun come up in a blaze of 50 degree glory.


Hikers routinely leave their cars here in the huge graveled lot. I felt rather a fraud stopping off to simply let Cheyenne pee and sniff.


There are the usual information boards and...


...useful signs.


The famous AT is nothing more than a rather long and frequently strenuous walk in the woods. It's not a yellow brick road nor a path to Shangri-La. It's just a trail, marked rather idiotically by excessively frequent white paint blazes as though it could possibly be something other than what it is.


Cheyenne was in no hurry.


And as it turned out, neither was I.


I never thought I would find myself on top of a place called Catawba Mountain but here I was quite enjoying the cold Spring morning.


If I have to be honest it is rather more impressive a place than your average, common-or-garden mangrove swamp.



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Downtown Roanoke

Plenty of flags in downtown Roanoke which lend color but is it any surprise the heart of the city is dominated by all the antennae that make a television station work?

As much as it is despised, the mainstream press is what the mainstream depends on for a daily reality check. When I let strangers know I have no TV reception, more do I want any they tend to get either thunderstruck or angry.

The big banks have twisted the press around their collective little finger and we are all suffering for those shortcomings.



Roanoke did better no doubt in the boom years before the crash like everywhere else. There are plenty of empty storefronts to attest to that downtown.



But Roanoke has a vibrant core that avoids box stores and debates about sustainability by sustaining local artisans and growers in the Roanoke River Valley.

Go by in the afternoon and the city market is wrapped for the day. No preservatives is a policy that requires early sales. Go by in the morning and finds meat fruits and vegetables coming to your table direct from the growers. Local food for local people, and demand is so high for space there is a waiting list to become a vendor.

Go downtown on a motorcycle and don't expect to find dedicated parking. However the cute local trolleys are part of the regular metro system and do more than clog streets with slow moving traffic as they do in Key West. These trolleys function as cute buses.



Key West's Havana One Cuban restaurant on Truman Avenue used to operate around here. Their move south has not removed the last trace of Cuban cuisine from Roanoke.

Cheyenne liked the sights and smells of the City Market even though I had forgotten her collar and had to improvise with a loop in her extend-a-leash.

Traffic was light, trees were in evidence all to the carbon dioxide good.



As was Roanoke's finest in evidence but I forgot to bring a patch to swap as police departments have a habit of doing. The patch is the log worn on the shoulder of the uniform and swapping these symbols is a widespread hobby among law enforcement.



The founding family of the Advance Auto Parts chain lives around here and donated something like 76 million bucks to locate a misplaced flying saucer here. It's actually a performing arts center and quite controversial in shape they say though it works beautifully.



More traditional is the Hotel Roanoke dominating it's own piece of Elizabethan skyline.

On one side of the market is old time Roanoke's old fashioned barber shop, while on the other side, seen in the reflection is the new and gentrified renovation, still not completely accepted despite the deplorable condition of the original building.

The Cornerstone was our stop for beer and cold water. Beer above the table and cold water below.

Cheyenne was supplied under the table by the friendly bartender because Roanoke unlike Key West allows dogs outdoors in bars without elaborate and silly health and insecurity regulations such as are the fashion in the Sunshine State.

It was a good moment to stop and measure the head on a draft beer, or the silly signs in the bar.



Roanoke has miles of bicycle trails and sells itself as an outdoor city in the Blue Ridge mountains. Never mind the trails and the hiking and the paddling, I like that it has benches in it's parks and no snowbirds and no traffic jams.



It has unobtrusive bums not panhandling as though they were on Duval but they do have to pray for their supper at the massive Christian Mission nearby.



And no matter how far one gets from the Southernmost Point one finds reminders everywhere. I thought for a moment the city was coming up to meet me and save me a long drive home.

Key West in this context is I am told a band not unlike the locally grown Latitude 24 of Keys fame. Key West really is everywhere.


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Trout Farming In Virginia

My guide through the mountain roads of Virginia, Sandra of Roanoke, used to come to the hatchery as a child on family excursions.


They looked at the fish spawning and growing in the various tanks. We did the same, bypassing the building which was closed and uninviting, going where the fish operations themselves were wide open and unsupervised, a lovely anachronism in the 21st century when everything is locked and terrorists lurk everywhere.


However while the tanks are open to a wandering public there are rules:


I liked the note at the bottom about small children. I had no idea spotted trout are carnivores. It makes them sound like pirañha.


The life of a trout growing up in a long rectangular cement box seems rather dull to me, but against all the odds these bored fish seem to thrive:


Apparently the fish raising operations are paid for in part by angling enthusiasts and outdoor organizations to keep the streams populated. They seem to be doing a good job.


In the summer months a quarter dropped in the right place will yield a handful of fish food to entertain the troops.


These are spectacular places, vast spacious empty forests covering the sides of rolling hills.


Made more appealing it seems by the addition of fish.


All this work, all this paraphernalia to raise fish to be dropped at a suitable date into the streams so people can catch them and kill them and eat them.


Fortunately the raw material flows by in abundance. Paint Bank, a strange name for an unusual place. I have now seen fish farming with mine own eyes.


Paint Bank Trout Hatchery


Further up the road the community has a general store with gasoline and the swinging bridge restaurant, not yet open when we drove by but we stopped in to check out the rustic wood interior with a reputation for good food, including local buffalo meat. Across the street is the Depot Lodge with a train caboose offering sleeping accommodations. Paint Bank, a weird name with much to see.
Paint Bank Link


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Dodging West Virginia

Highway 311 travels west from Roanoke and is, I am told packed on summer weekends with hordes of families in vans and motorcyclists in a hurry. On a late March morning it was empty and delightful as it took us to lunch in Lewisburg, West Virginia across the Allegheny Mountains.


The Highway wanders mercilessly between Virginia and West Virginia, making a driver like me think it would be tough to get a speeding ticket here as the states change hands all the time. Cross a state line and leave the trooper behind...if they even bother to post a trooper out here on a short stretch of road.


Clearly Virginia wins the smooth tarmac award but the scenery is first rate in either state.


The winding state line is an odd phenomenon when you consider West Virginia was carved by hand out of Virginia during the Civil War to get the North an extra buffer state.


You'd think they could have drawn a clean line, perhaps following a river or a ridge but the skeptics among us wonder if money and influence played a part in which side of the Mason Dixon line the land fell.


Lewisburg is the capital of Greenbrier County, a place that seems to have difficulty with the concept of leaving well alone. The mountains seemed sufficient entertainment without the need for billboards.


Immediately I wanted to know who voted this town for an award.


It turns out Budget Travel Magazine seeks nominations from readers each year and in 2011 the editors selected a group of nominees and readers gave Lewisburg 1st place and Astoria, Oregon second, with Clayton in New York's Thousand Islands, third. Now you know.


The designation is reserved for towns of less than 10,000 inhabitants and Lewisburg with around 4,000 qualifies.


The criteria for selection seem to revolve around the rather etherial quality of cool, or hipness. Lewisburg is pretty enough


It makes a nice lunch destination from Roanoke on a day off, and so e window displays are unintentionally quite funny. Psst! need a ghost for your kitchen?


This sticker in a shop window left me quite puzzled. At first I wondered if it was some reference to gay men, I would be a bear were I into buggery, so at first I got slightly anxious wondering if they needed a support group in this coolest of small towns. Then I wondered if it had to do with the state symbol of West Virginia, the black bear, or possibly it refers to the local manly man sports radio station "The Bear" which is full of sports talk and other male boredom.


At eleven bucks I hope it is something to do with gay men, the least pedestrian of the options. In the park downtown amidst the cornucopia of real estate offices, yoga pads, kitchen stores and coffee shops there is a park where West Highland Terriers are banned.


On mature reflection I was forced to the conclusion that the symbol referred to all dogs including Cheyenne which just seemed wrong. Coolest small town indeed!


I liked Lewisburg. Made appetizing by a lunch consisting of a large Portuguese (?) sausage sandwich, large enough to serve for dinner as well and the craft beer was delicious and the walking was splendid. And no one seemed to mind that West Virginia is hardly a real state at all, carved from it's neighbor, now a state of mind, a buffer, and a very nice one at that, deduced from this small incursion.


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