"Wading through the waste stormy winter and there's not a friend to help you through. Trying to stop the waves behind your eyeballs. Drop your reds, drop your greens and blues."
Whether Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote this song about a woman or the state I can't say. I'm definitely leaning towards the latter, mostly because I cannot believe the lack of songs written about Virginia. I don't think I'm alone in this feeling of being kept in the dark. Maybe Virginia, with its majestic autumn colors, Shenandoah Valley, its old friendly towns and artisan bacon is just one of the better kept secrets the East coast keeps from the West.
Supposedly the drive down I-81 from Asheville to Johnson City, Tennessee is stunning. It was a little past 9pm when we did it and Marisa and I couldn’t see a thing. We were planning on pushing through to a rest stop just outside Roanoke,VA. My good friend Dan grew up in Marion, VA so we stopped to fill up the tank there and take the opportunity to get a glimpse into his childhood. We must have taken the wrong exit to this small town because the only thing we glimpsed through the dense fog was the county jail. The most extraordinary aspect of the beginning of our journey into Virginia was the rain stopping immediately after we crossed the border. We pulled into the rest stop after midnight and fell asleep within seconds.
The next morning I woke up, used the rest stop bathroom and let the mutt out to stretch her legs. By the time Marisa woke up we were pulling into Roanoke in search of a decent breakfast and a much needed cup of coffee. Our original plan hadn’t gotten past us getting out of North Carolina's rain. Marisa was flipping through the road atlas and I assumed she was probably just looking for a National Forest we could pitch a tent in for the night. Then I noticed her measuring out the distance on the country map with her finger tips.
"New York isn’t very far from the northern part of Virginia" She said.
"Oh yeah......I guess everything is closer on the east coast, especially compared to Texas." I wasn’t really sure if Marisa was suggesting something or if she was just being informative.
"We could visit Devin," she said, her voice half joking, half quite serious.
Devin is a close friend of ours from Portland. He had been farming in the Hudson Valley of New York all summer. Originally I had my doubts about driving to New York, but then I compared it to our current plan which didn’t get us past the end of the week. I glanced at the clock and picked up our cell phone.
"Devin! Hey man, did I wake you?"
"No, no, I needed to get up anyway. What's going on? Where are you guys?"
"Virginia. What are you up to this weekend?"
"Nothing, come on up."
"Yeah?" I said.
"Yeah man, come on up."
"All right We'll call you when we get closer."
I shut the phone off and turned towards Marisa.
“He said come on up,” I said.
“Really? Just like that,” Marisa said with a smile.
“Yeah, pretty much, just like that. Devin's great....so yeah, I think this will be good. We’ll visit Devin, hit the outer banks on our way back and then buckle down and get jobs in North Carolina.”
Marisa was still looking at the atlas. “You know, it looks like Portland, Maine is just up the road from New York. We could go see what Audrey’s up to.” This time she had a lot more humor in her voice.
“Yeah, right, and Wisconsin is just another day to the west. We could visit my brother and meet his new wife.”
We stopped at a wonderful farmer’s market and picked up some sausage biscuits and blueberries. This market looked like the same famers had been coming to this exact spot for fifty years. We briefly discussed moving to Roanoke after we get back from New York. The Subaru was 1500 miles overdue for an oil change and more miles than I care to say overdue for a tire rotation .We took the car into a local place to prepare for our journey. The attendant mentioned that we are in desperate need of new tires. I pretend not to hear this for now.
It wasn’t until we pulled onto the Blue Ridge Parkway that Virginia showed up on our radar. The mountain views have so many layers. The first layer is filled with all the reds and yellows of Appalachian fall. The furthest layer is covered in a oceanic blue haze. Everything in between blends gracefully from focused to blurry. Just as were falling in love with Virginia, the car began acting a little strange. It had a lack of power going up the hills. We chalked this up as the car being tired from the long drive out East. Luckily, there were plenty of places to pull off and let any driver that wanted to go more than 20 get by.
We stumbled across a little dirt road. There were old farmhouses on the side of the road and deep pine forests. We were exploring camping options when I noticed a trailhead sign. We decided to s
tretch our legs and let Maggie run around. The sign was labeled with the legendary AT symbol. We had come across the Appalachian Trail which for me was kind of like going to Mecca. I’ve done trail work before and Marisa and I have been talking about hiking the AT in its entirety for years. I can’t even express the feeling of walking on a trail that goes all the way from Georgia to Maine. Comprehending that distance on foot is truly mind blowing. The trail is part of the reason we’ve traveled to the Southeast. We walked up and down the trail a bit and it was nothing short of gorgeous. I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods of the Rockies, Cascades and the great Northwest but this forest had a totally different appeal. I dunked my head in a cool stream and we went back to the car fully rejuvenated.
As Marisa started her driving shift, things seemed to get much worse with our car quirks. The tachometer was all over the place and the steeper the hill, the more we began to think, “we’re not gonna make it…” The Subaru was struggling, sometimes at less than 5 miles per hour. I was constantly checking for a pulloff, possible places to spend an indeterminate amount of time. We checked the atlas and found a rest stop on I-64, just outside of Charlottesville. The only reason we decided that this was our best option is that it seemed to be the only sure route anywhere that was primarily downhill. I took over as driver and forced our poor car the extra 6 miles to the I-64 on ramp. We coasted to the rest area. I have to say this was the most beautiful interstate rest stop I had ever seen. We even saw a Peregrine Falcon while we were walking Maggie. I popped the hood and pretended to know something about mechanics. Everything looked alright, so I shut her down. Originally the game plan was to hang out at the rest stop until Monday morning and then coast into Charlottesville and find an honest mechanic. The problem was it was 4pm on a Saturday when we made it to the rest stop. We had a stove and plenty of pasta, but after we noticed the security guard giving us funny looks while we were preparing dinner, we started to get the feeling it might be a long 40 hours. We informed Devin of our dilemma via cell phone and had Marisa’s parents, Warren and Peggy, do some research on the Car Talk website for us. After dinner we played a game of cribbage and crawled into our sleeping bags shortly past sundown.
The next morning it was painfully obvious that we couldn’t live at the rest stop much longer. I scrapped plan A and immediately decided to coast to Charlottesville. Marisa wasn’t ready to be awake when I headed for town, but I hadn’t gone a morning without a cup of coffee in 2 and ½ years and didn’t want to find out how strong my caffeine addiction had really gotten. Charlottesville is an amazing small city. Brickwork covers everything and Main Street is covered with thriving, locally owned businesses. We ate breakfast at a little café that reminded us of Portland, Oregon. I ordered the special and I still think about it to this day. It was an egg in the hole with farm fresh pulled pork covering the top of it. The pork was from Polyface Farms, featured in Michael Pollan’s book, ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’. We explored the pedestrian mall downtown and discovered the visitor’s center. Marisa grabbed a bunch of maps of the area and the nice man behind the counter let us know about a KOA campground just outside of town. He also confirmed that the mechanic Peggy and Warren had found for us was great and his own mechanic as well. After checking out the restaurants and markets we were pleased to discover that this part of the Shenandoah Valley has a solid local food movement. If you go to the Chipotle mexican restaurant (the fast food chain) all the pork comes from Polyface farms, some of the best meat in the country, and even the peppers and onions are often sourced from local organic farms. There were a number of other restaurants and stores we passed that proudly listed the local farmers they bought from in their windows.
In a matter of hours we had accidentally fallen in love with Virginia and we owed it all to our broken down vehicle. Being a child of the west, I was swept away by the area's history. The Shenandoah Valley was pivotal in the Civil War. There are battlefields everywhere. Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, is just outside Charlottesville. We walked Maggie for hours in what we later began to refer to as the “Maggie Mae Pees Across America” tour 
and then caught a movie downtown to kill the hours before dark. The car managed the 7 miles to the KOA campground. It was mostly downhill through rolling farmland. The Charlottesville KOA is truly beautiful, despite their blatant misspellings of Kabin, Kampground, Kamping and Kamp which nearly drove Marisa insane. At the KOA there is a small trail that leads to a pond and a variety of mushrooms peek their heads up through the leaf litter that covers every campsite and the forest floor.
Marisa called the mechanic the next morning to see if he worked on Subarus.
“Subarus? Yeah, we work on Subarus all day.” Yet another reason that Charlottesville feels so much like home. I thought we weren’t going to make it up 4 or 5 of the hills on the way to town, but luckily we did, although I’m sure we made a dozen people late for work in the process. The guy behind the counter was a real character. He was decked out in brand new Washington Redskins gear. He at least had the hat and jersey and may have been wearing the pants too, it was hard to tell. We gave him the keys and then carried on with the “Maggie Mae Pees Across America” tour. We explored Charlottesville some more while we waited for the damage report. We were downtown when we got the call. “Your clutch……it’s bad. You got a bad clutch.” Just like that. The way he said it was hilarious, which was great, because the $700 it would take to fix it wasn’t funny at all. We were issued an old blue Volvo to borrow for the night. The thing had 294,000 miles on it and it felt like it took a full 10 seconds to cross an intersection. It did manage to get us back to the KOA in one piece, and that was the important part. After eating some veggie bratwursts, we fell asleep in our tent.
We spent the next morning checking out the surrounding area. At the time we were convinced that we wanted to live in Charlottesville. The countryside was phenomenal, especially with all the fall colors. Thick woods, small farms, old red barns, the whole place felt so timeless. For a brief moment we thought about giving up the New York trip and staying there, but since all our stuff was (and still is) in Therin’s crawl space in North Carolina we figured Virginia would still be there when we inevitably came to claim our possessions. We grabbed some tasty Thai food and our newly functioning Subaru and headed north to New York. 
