Charlottesville and Waynesboro, Virginia

I’m back from a relaxing trip to Charlottesville, Virginia where my friend and I stayed with our accommodating friend, Joe H. On Friday we explored downtown Charlottesville and poked around the bookstores down there. I was amused to discover this tree with a bit of guerrilla knitting on it. In my old blog I once did a post on guerrilla knitting and have since tried to hunt up pieces of urban knitting in Baltimore. But, since that sort of thing comes and goes I am not always successful. So, I was happy to find this in a little park near the library, not far from an equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee. From maps I guess that this would be near the corner of 1st and Market.

I love Charlottesville, or “T.J.’s town”, as out host sometimes calls it. It has a pleasant country charm but it also has a lot of cultural things that I am used to up here in Baltimore: movies, bookstores and museums. They even have some sort of shopping promenade near this park, with lots of cool little shops and theatres. I wish the area around our harbor here in Baltimore was like that instead of full of chain restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory.

On Saturday we tooled around Waynesboro, which is just over the mountain from Charlottesville. It has a great Salvation Army, Chinese buffet, music store, and an excellent little museum operated by the Waynesboro Heritage Foundation. This museum is free and packed with things related to Waynesboro history, from the Civil War, to local industry, to their movie theaters and drug stores. If you like 19th century history there is a lot to see in this little old bank building.

After that, we wanted to go up on the Blue Ridge mountains and travel sight-see along Skyline Drive but it was closed. Our host speculated that it was due to storm damage, not only from the February snow, but also from the recent wind and rainstorms that were ending as we arrived. There seemed to be a lot of storm damage on trees down there, even more so that up here and we got it pretty bad. Still, the rain cleared out by afternoon and so our host took us to a place where we could get a few scenic photos.