Road Trip - Part II

I'm back at Farm Dover after a whirlwind weekend in Floyd, VA. Let's see, I promised to tell you what I found in town while Maggie was attending her bee class, which started out at the Country Store and ended up at the Spikenard Farm and Honey Bee Sanctuary.

The town is tiny, all of two blocks long and one block wide, but jammed packed with locally owned places: a coffee roaster, farm hardware store, antique mall, yarn shop, several art galleries and a cozy coffee shop, located above a music book shop. Here's a look around...

 

After a morning in town, I headed out to the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway with the intent of finding the Mabry Mill. It was purported to be the most photographed site on the entire parkway, and now you can see why. 

After a hike around the mill, I headed to the Honey Bee Sanctuary to pick up Maggie. Since founding Spikenard Farm in 2006, Gunther Hauk and his wife Vivian have been actively spreading their vision of sustainable biodynamic beekeeping. The Spikenard Honeybee Sanctuary provides on-site workshops, lectures, consulting and publications.

We celebrated Maggie's 25th birthday that night with dinner at Oddfella's, followed by moosetrack ice cream back at the Country Store, which was also the site of a very popular Saturday night country dance (think Grand Old Opry).



The next morning we had breakfast on the porch of the Ambrosia Bed & Breakfast, before saying goodby to our host, Caroline. On the way home, we listened to the first book of The Hunger Games, making the seven-hour trip back home go fairly quickly. As we pulled in the drive, we still had a chapter or two to go. We thought about sitting in the car and finishing the tape, but decided we had better go in and see how Ed survived the weekend home alone. It appears he did just fine....but he was glad to see us.



All and all, it was a lovely weekend -- especially nice to spend it with Maggie. I hope she decides to go back for another class and invites me along again.