The Hampton Inn & Manorhouse

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #6
Lexington, VA - Sun, 1 Sep 2024. 10:30pm

My trips often take me to fairly anonymous looking hotels in office parks and small towns. For tonight and tomorrow night we're in a Hampton Inn... in a mansion built in 1827.



This is the Col Alto house in Lexington, VA. It was built for a US Congressman.

Of course, we're not in the historic mansion part of the building. Yes, rooms were available there, but they're a) old-timey and b) $$$. We're around back in what feels like the servants' quarters, on the ground floor. Except it's not really the servants' quarters because... think about it... 1827 in Virginia, a slave state. The servants were enslaved people. They probably slept 6 to a room in a wooden shack. Yes, there's literally a wooden shack outside our room! A historic marker proclaims "nobody knows what it was used for." 🙄 Our ground floor room may only have a single window that opens barely 4 inches for fresh air, but we have all the modern conveniences.

Dinner at the Buffet. Long Drive to Boone, NC

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #13
Boone, NC - Tue, 3 Sep 2024. 11:15pm

I'm skipping ahead from my previous blog. Rest assured that once we arrived in Lexington, VA we went enjoy two days of hiking in the area. I'm skipping over those blogs as my photo workflow is backlogged and I'm not going to have time to deal with it tonight. And tonight I want to write about, well, tonight. After two days of hiking out from Lexington we drove to Boone, NC to set up for our next several days of hiking. And it's been a long day of driving.

We've driven over 360 miles today. No, that's not a lot... if all we did was drive. But we didn't just drive. We also hiked for several hours up in the Shenandoah National Park. (Hiking blog is in the backlog.) So it's been a long day.

We stopped for dinner this evening in Roanoke. (Yes, same area we stayed a few nights ago.) We were hungry, in a hurry, and had low standards. So we ate at a buffet restaurant. One thing... interesting... about this buffet restaurant was the number of morbidly obese people there. I'm talking 400 lbs, 500, or maybe more. Several of them, though not all, had motorized scooters to get around. I swear it felt like bumper cars in the restaurant at one point. It's kind of stereotypical to say, "These people need scooters because they're too fat to walk." That's a little unfair because the fact is a handicap that prevents a person from walking contributes to weight gain. But at some point you gotta say, "Maybe stop loading up at the buffet."

After dinner we finished our drive to Boone. One interesting thing about the drive there is the last leg, on US 421 from I-77 outside of Winston-Salem, is just up, up, up. Drive up a hill, level off. Drive up another hill, level off. Drive up another hill, etc. After about 40 miles of that we crossed the Continental Divide at the Blue Ridge Parkway at elev. 3,100'. Yeah, that's not high by Western US standards; a few weeks ago we were hiking above 9,000' in the Carson Pass. But here in the east it's a lot.

Well, it's after 11:30pm now. I'd better wrap this and wind down for bed so I can get up at a reasonable hour tomorrow. Another day of hiking awaits!