Days 8 and 9: Old Dominion

Editor’s note: Given limited travel opportunities these days, I decided each Thursday to post travel stories I’d written prior to starting this blog. The following is from a cross-country trip I made along the length of US 50 in the spring of 2018. I hope you might vicariously enjoy this trip while we’re all hunkering down at home. Because this is a longer trip (a week and a half), I’m going to post each of the daily entries over each of the next 10 days.

So, I took yesterday off from driving 50, and instead spent the day visiting my friend Chris and his wonderful wife Carol at their lakefront home in Moneta, which is 40 minutes outside of Roanoke (pop: 9,891) in southern Virginia. Even if you haven’t been to Moneta, you’ve seen it in the classic Bill Murray film, What About Bob? Chris shares a number of my interests, including trains, Edward Allen Poe, and Sherlock Holmes. Accordingly, we spent yesterday at the O. Winston Link museum and the Virginia Museum of Transportation. We ate a late lunch at Roanoke’s oldest (and perhaps smallest) restaurant, and then went back home to fail miserably at a game based around a Sherlock Holmes mystery. 

Today I left Moneta around noon, and, at Chris’ suggestion, I stopped at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (pop: 47,000) to see Edgar Allan Poe’s dorm room. It turns out that Poe had studied at UVA in 1826.

Poe’s dorm room is preserved with period furniture and references to his then-budding literary career.

It should be noted that the room is part of a still-operating dorm building. Poe’s room (#13, fittingly) is glassed off, but the all the other rooms are occupied by UVA students. To that point, the space in front of Poe’s current next door neighbor was littered with beer empties. I am not making this up. You’d wish that the current residents of Poe’s dorm building would show more respect for Poe’s memory. And yet, if you think about how Poe met his demise, perhaps the beer empties are fitting.

About 6 pm I finally make it back to Winchester, VA, whence I’d taken my detour away from US 50 on Wednesday evening. Rather than resume my driving trip immediately, I decided to just get some dinner and find a hotel for the night, and start out fresh in the morning. Now, I’ve had surprisingly good luck with my hotel accommodations all along this trip. I’ve been stopping mainly in small towns, and the innkeepers have seemed genuinely happy to see me. Today, however, I’m in a somewhat larger town, the motel is rather crowded, and to the innkeeper I’m just another traveler who’s washed up onto his doorstep. Out in the parking lot, next to my room, some other guests are drinking beer and rebuilding the engine of their Cutlass. Next to them, a group of young people has a Weber barbecue set up in the parking lot, with flames at an alarming height. It actually seems rather festive. But I wonder if any of these people is actually staying at the motel.

Since I don’t have any US 50 stories from today, allow me to share a few earlier photos that didn’t make it into previous blogs:

OK, now you’re caught up on my photo collection from US 50 so far. Tomorrow I should get through Washington, DC and into MD. Until then!

Sdb

P.S.” The Yaris has now logged close to 3,000 miles on this trip (with detours). There are two ways of measuring this. One is the odometer, and the other is the accretion of bugs on the sideview mirror: