Road Trip: South - inalnd trip
Day 7: Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - Wytheville, VA
Weather: Upper 70s. Partly cloudy with a brief shower.
Steps: 7,434 (Steve), 6,565 (Linda)
Drove: 83 miles
Today's breakfast was in between the others: fresh made waffles, biscuits and gravy and cereal. No sccrambled eggs.
Wytheville was an interesting town. We started off by hitting three small museums: the Great Lakes to Florida Museum
was first. It was small but still had some interesting items. First up, the original reconditioned gas pumps
(notice the price, $0.178):
An old and original Coca-Cola cooler and station counter:
An old and original adding machine and register (with a bottle of original formula glass cleaner):
An oil-filling device:
There was a computer display with some additional info and pictures. One item that I thought was
particularly "interesting" was this headline - which you would NEVER see published today:
Some artifacts and an original Texaco sign:
The two of us in the station:
Then we made our way to the other two Museums, which were next to each other. The first was the Thomas
Boyd Museum. Not too many artifacts but a decent amount of history of the town. Some of this included
information about the civil war, Wyrick Spring and the polio epidemic. On the topic of the polio epidemic,
Wytheville was one of the hardest hit per capita town. This was one of the iron lung devices used:
Not too many pictures were taken, though they were of the 1840 and 1850 fire engines in the basement.
The third museum was the Rock House Museum.
After these three we strolled through town and saw Skeeter's World Famous Hot Dogs:
The famous huge pencil (it really is as big as it looks, this isn't an optical illusion or a Photoshop mod):
It's a quaint little town.
We even visited the Edith Bolling Wilson house. It was generally a small house. Photography was prohibited
inside. It was also in transition and we had to use our imaginations to picture what was in the rooms.
Though we had barbeque again - probably ranked third of the four - it was decent. It likely would have been better if they had ribs. But they only do ribs on the weekend. The portions were decent and included two sides, hush puppies (though they called them dogs) and a bag of chips. Alas, this was one of the few times we didn't get a picture.
We were done with our scheduled sightseeing a little on the early side. So we drove to the West Wind Farm winery. We did a tasting and bought a bottle of wine to enjoy with an evening snack (we still had some left over chocolate covered Georgia pecans).
It was still early so we decided to drive to a location called Big Walker Lookout. It was about
a half hour away from the winery and on the other side of our hotel. On our way we noticed that it had
rained in the area - though not where we were. There was some steam rising off the mountains in the valley
while we were driving through it. It made an interesting effect that the picture doesn't do justice:
After a long and winding road, up hill the entire way, we made our destination. Though we zip-lined earlier
on our trip, there was just no way either of us was going up this tower - which happened to be 100 feet:
The view from near the tower was quite spectacular nonetheless - we were at an altitude of 3,045 feet:
There were some look-outs to get a view anyway (the top of the tower would have been at 3,145). On the second
the camera was, again, not properly set (in order to try to get better pictures, I've been playing with the settings -
sometimes that backfires [and it is a little difficult to see the preview screen in bright light with sunglasses on
to see how good or bad the image is]):
And there was a Country Store near the tower too:
Some information about the battle of Wyhteville:
We made our back to the hotel, had our wine and snack, and got to bed a little early so we could get up early to go to Charlottesville. This is why we tried to change our travel to nights - so we could arrive at our next destination at night while everything is closed.