Thursday December 10th.

A deluxe gold Dodge car; boot (or I should say trunk) in which you could easily spend the night with room to spare, and so much horse power you’d need an articulated lorry to deliver the hay for them.  Automatic of course – no gear lever (or should I say gear stick – language is still a problem here).  Bill drove it, most of the time very effectively except that his left, i.e. clutch, foot would keep going to the floor and hitting the brake pedal, the effect of which was to cause the power assisted braking system to kick in violently and nearly garotte Mary Carolyn and me on our safety belts.  And so we cruised elegantly out of the car park, halting so abruptly at the stop line that I’m sure the back wheels left the road. 

Soon we were out on the open road.  In the distance, the Blue Ridge Mountains ringed the horizon, spindly trees and pines thick on their slopes and softening the horizon.  Houses tucked in among the trees, ubiquitous verandahs with rocking chairs, and most with large areas of fenced ground zig-zagging in Appalachian mountain style around them, often with horses cropping the grass within.  Horse breeding is big business here.  A craft shop, hot chocolate and muffins in a cosy cafe.  Lake Sharando, frozen hard, leaves and sticks immobile under the transparency of the ice.  Bear paw prints in the snow.  Leaves on the tree so dry and cold they rattled as the breeze rifled through them.  A roadside shop, selling Amish cheeses and jams – he insists we sample them and as a result we leave well loaded.  The roads are long and straight, traffic light.  The Appalachian Mountains rim the skyline.

We found the Frontier Cultural Museum and spent the afternoon there.  A series of houses showed the kinds of lives that the immigrants had left to come to Virginia in the 1600’s and 1700’s, each one with an appropriately clad person to welcome and explain.  There were four main sources of people – England, Germany, Ulster (Scots/Irish), and the Biafran area of Africa.  The reasons for their emigration were economic, religious persecution and the slave trade.  Then there were houses showing how these settlers had gradually progressed and melded their cultures together while still having their own distinct identities.  The first was minute  – no more than a shed.  The later ones were really quite spacious and comfortable houses, wooden walls, painted, kitchens well equipped with cast iron ware.

Then off on the long straight highway, stopping as the sun set to view the whole central valley of Virginia from a viewpoint high on the mountain side.  Home to Charlottesville and a stop to collect the necessaries for a dinner of barbecue beef with North Carolina barbecue sauce that could quite conceivably have dissolved our tonsils.