Richmond, Virginia

Mile 3710

Another night with a real bed and a hot shower last night! We are in Richmond, Virginia staying at our friend Steve's house. What a nice house and a HUGE yard. Lots of room to run around! Steve was kind enough to treat us to a late night supper when we arrived. What great friends we have! It's been a couple of days since the last blog so let's get caught up:

We checked out of the motel in Mobile at around 7am Sunday morning and soon found ourselves crossing into Florida an hour later at mile 2506. We drove along the gulf coast of the Florida panhandle from Pensacola to Fort Walton Beach, then cut up north to get back into Alabama.


We took a VERY nice drive off the Interstate up through central Alabama passing through many small rural towns. Those drives are always so interesting. We like small towns. We got to Montgomery, Alabama at mile 2836 and took the obligatory state capitol building picture. What a quiet town Montgomery seems to be. Perhaps being Sunday in the bible belt keeps things mellow like that. The streets were almost deserted in the downtown area.


By mile 2923, we found ourselves in Georgia at 3:29pm. We rolled into the huge city of Atlanta a couple of hours later and headed straight for the state capitol. The statue in the picture is John B. Gordon, a former Georgia Governor and Senator. There was a Braves game about to get underway, as we saw the fans headed for the game as we drove past Turner Field. In stark contrast to Montgomery, Atlanta was as busy as a big city should be. Hundreds of people were gathered at Centennial Olympic Park watching a fountain show set to classical music. Not quite the Bellagio, but it sure drew a crowd on this hot Atlanta day. We spent awhile driving around downtown Atlanta, looking for interesting things to take pictures of. I think we found one. Atlanta seems to be a great city and regret that we only spent a couple for hours there. But as it is with every other stop, we had to keep on going.


As night fell, we crossed the state line into South Carolina at mile 3108, and then North Carolina right after that at mile 3182. A little over an hour later driving up toward the mountains, we mistakenly made a wrong turn while looking for a campground. We ended up in the city of Asheville. What a great discovery! It sounds funny, but even though everything was closed, it looked like such a fantastic town. We couldn't wait to revisit it in the morning!

We eventually found the campground by close to midnight Sunday night, quickly made camp, built a fire and even managed to cook some dinner. We camp the way you are supposed to do it with a tent and sleeping bags. Oh, and of course, the laptop for blogging. (This campground has free wi-fi access!) Sleep came quickly as we had covered a lot of mileage that day.


Monday morning, we made a camp breakfast of coffee, oj, bacon and eggs. We broke down camp and then went into Asheville to check out the town in the daylight. We were right! It was a neat little city. Lots of cafes, coffee shops and people on the streets. We finally got onto the Blue Ridge Parkway at almost 11am at the Asheville entrance. We covered close to 300 miles on the Parkway, exiting at Roanoke, crossing the border into Virginia along the way at mile 3428 of our trip. Unfortunately, we were not treated kindly by the weather gods and could not enjoy the beautiful views we had been expecting. Most of the day was cloudy with heavy haze obscuring the mountain scenery. However, it was still a very pleasant drive, taking us almost eight hours to complete. We cut eastward across Virginia via Highways 460 and 360 into Richmond and arrived at Steve's house around 10:30pm.