Museli and yogurt breakfast in our room this morning before packing up and heading off.

First stop was the Mast General Store in a town called Valle Crucis – don’t ask us how to say that because we have no idea. We went to the Mast General Store in Asheville but we were a bit rushed as it was near closing time, but this one is the original. It basically sells everything you could ever need. Food, kitchen gadgets, clothes, shoes, candy, toys, books, etc etc etc Very cool shop that’s been there since some time in the late 1800’s.

After spending way too long in there and only buying a pair of sock monkey socks, we went down the street to the Mast Store annex and looked at more things. They have a huuuuuge candy selection – you can fill up a basket with candy and pay by weight. We have already eaten more sugar this trip than we likely have all year so we sadly didn’t buy any candy as tempting as it was. I can imagine kids going wild in here – Piper I’m looking at you 🤣

After all that Mast Store browsing we needed a coffee. The internet told us that Hatchett Coffee was the best in Boone. And we believe everything we read on the internet. Luckily the internet was right – it was damn good coffee and a cute cafe with friendly staff as well. A+

Ok gotta get going and leave Boone. We are not very good at this are we?

First stop about an hour along the parkway was the Blue Ridge Music Center.

They have live music on the porch between 12-3pm every day and there is a small museum all about Mountain music/bluegrass music and how it came to be. It’s really great – and free! We stayed there quite a while.

Time was however, marching on and we still had quite a drive ahead of us. The Parkway is beautiful but slow going.

Next stop, the town of Floyd. We are officially in Virginia now. The Floyd Country store has a bluegrass jamboree every Friday night – sadly it was only Thursday so we weren’t going to get to see it. I tried hard to fit this in the our schedule but it just wouldn’t work.

It looks like it would be a good time.

We had ice cream (me) and a milkshake (Steve) at the soda fountain next door.

Then we had to get back on the parkway and head to Roanoke, Virginia – which was our stop for the night.

As it was getting in the evening (although still very light – stays light until after 9pm) we started seeing deer along the parkway so we had to be extra vigilant as nobody wants to hit a deer. They are mostly pretty good though (better than kangaroos) and just chill at the side of the road and look at you as you drive past. We saw quite a few.

On the way into Roanoke we stopped by the “Roanoke Star”. It’s the biggest steel star in the world or something like that. It was pretty cool. A nice lady took some photos of us in front of it. It lights up too but as mentioned earlier, it pretty much never gets dark here and we really needed dinner and we still hadn’t checked in to our hotel so we weren’t gonna wait around for that.

We got in to Roanoke and found our hotel. To be honest it looked a lot better on the internet. I guess they can’t all be winners. The hotel used to be a bank which was kind of cool. Roanoke seemed a little rough also, so we didn’t venture out once we got to the hotel. We had dinner at the hotel which was decent enough and the restaurant manager sat with us and talked about politics which was lovely.