The southern Piedmont in Virginia is not as posh as the area around Charlottesville. The largest city is Lynchburg, an old industrial hill town along the James River. I got to town close to dusk and drove back and forth through the downtown area contemplating dinner at a restaurant overlooking the river recommended by my friend Don. The difference with downtown Charlottesville is like night and day. Downtown Lynchburg almost completely deserted during non-business hours on a Saturday night and it looks like little new has been built for a long time. It's probably worth a walk around in daylight for the old architecture and monuments, but it’s definitely not a happening place in the evening.

Lynchburg gained fame over the last several decades as the place where Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell had his mega church and started a college which has become the very large Liberty University . I ended up in Lynchburg on a Saturday night and couldn’t help considering a cross-cultural Sunday morning experience – going to Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church on Sunday morning. Ha! Falwell kicked the bucket in 2007, but I believe his church and school have remained true to his theology and ideology.

Lynchburg on a Saturday night actually turned out to be a travel planning disaster. It had been a few nights since I moteled it, so I was feeling due for a night in a bed. I discovered that it was a Liberty University home football game when I unintentionally got to the main road passing the campus in search of a feed and a sleep, and it was complete traffic nightmare in the aftermath of the football game. No reasonably priced motel room anywhere near Lynchburg tonight! I ate dinner in an Asian Hibachi grill buffet place and then went to a nearby Starbucks for WiFi. The conversations I couldn’t help overhearing were very different from what you usually hear at a hipster urban Starbucks or business-oriented suburban location – very heavy on church talk and religious subjects . One older man and two young women, probably a professor and students, were talking about archaeological evidence for the location of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and showing them photos on his laptop of his travels around Galilee in his search. Liberty apparently has a more ethnically diverse student body than I would have expected with a significant number of Asians and African-Americans around. I probably ought to have gone for a drive around campus in the morning.

Just outside of Lynchburg is an interesting place I had never heard of until I started researching places for this trip. Poplar Forest was Thomas Jefferson’s retreat home about 60 miles from Monticello, a place he also designed himself where he could retreat from his busy life at his primary residence. He also resembled a modern-day American in that he owned a vacation home. The reason I never heard of it when I lived in the East is that it had been sold off, destroyed by fire, and fallen into dereliction, only to get into the hands of a foundation to preserve it in 1980 . Thirty-Four years later restoration continues and house is an archaeological reconstruction site, each room at different stages. I arrived early and had the first tour to myself with a very good guide, but he was very evasive on my questions about the restoration work schedule and whether I’d be likely to see a fully restored site a la Monticello within my natural lifetime. Poplar Forest is a beautiful sight; I’d love to see it when it’s fully restored.

Onward southwest I skirted the mountains to take in the Booker T Washington National Monument, location of the birthplace as a slave of the important African-American writer and educator. Honestly, though, there’s not much there other than a few reconstructed slave cabins and barns and it was too gorgeous of a day to spend any time watching a film in the small visitor center.

The drive on route 40 from Ferrum to Woolwine was one of most wonderful in the East, 25 miles that took well over an hour on some of most winding road, over steep hills, and through remote feeling scenery. It was one of the few places I didn’t constantly find a line of speedsters on my consummate-Sunday driver’s tail. And it was Sunday, so slow-driving to take in the scenery is officially sanctioned, right?

I got onto the Blue Ridge Parkway in southern part of state so missed a big stretch from its start at Shenandoah National Park through central Virginia . I traveled the entire distance of the Parkway in 1982 on a family trip to the South. It was then the farthest I had ever been from home and was so exciting to take such an adventurous route to the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville and then visit my aunt and uncle in Northeast Georgia.

The Blue Ridge is very narrow in the north where you can see towns and civilization below on both sides from the crest in Shenandoah National Park. The range widens and sort of divides in southern Virginia, one side a kind of a front range rising sharply from the Piedmont, the other (which the Appalachian Trail follows) a distance to the west becoming the border between North Carolina and Tennessee and eventually the Smokies. Here the scenery widens out, no longer within national forests but bordered by private land, a pleasant landscape of small farm fields in the forest in a region settled in colonial times. This starts to feel like Hillbilly Country, although nowhere near as hardscrabble as the declining coal country several mountain ridges westward .

I was recommended to visit Chateau Morrisette Winery on a side road a few hundred meters from the Parkway. At an elevation of almost 3,000 feet the winery is not surrounded by vineyards, but what a fantastic marketing idea to put the winery right next to a route traveled by heaps of tourists rather than a remote location where grapes are grow well. The sightseers on the parkway will come in and sample and buy and remember and then order online or purchase in stores. Morrisette has grown to become one of Virginia’s largest wineries by production at an expected 90,000 cases this year even though they grow few of their grapes themselves. The place was absolutely mobbed on sunny last Sunday in October at peak foliage season, but I had to have a tasting anyway. Fit was a very varied flight of 10 wines, several of which were very good. Two in the flight were made using native Muscadine grapes, a taste to be tried but not to be taken too seriously. And then there were the fruit wines, including one made of pure blackberry . I bought a bottle of the economically priced Red Muscadine Wine for the evening and chilled it well in the fridge in my motel room. Perhaps no such foul a wine have I drunk since I was in college and stopped with my friends Scott and Larry at Duplin Cellars in Duplin County, North Carolina to stock up on Scuppernong wine on the way to the beach the week before sophomore year classes started.

Mabry Mill is supposedly an interesting site along the Parkway, but my inability to find a parking spot in mobbed parking lot led me to pass it by. Note to self (and advice to others) – never, NEVER, drive the Blue Ridge Parkway/Skyline Drive on a weekend day ever again. I spent the night in a motel in Galax, a small town a few miles west of parkway with reputation as a Bluegrass/Country music center.