FLYING HIGH OVER THE BLUE RIDGE

Larry had the vision for today's blog...literally!  Actually he gets to have many of the visions as we travail away up here on this mountain trying to market a lifestyle since his primary job descriptions would include walking beautiful land, enjoying vistas, capturing a sunset, sharing your dreams.  Hmmm.  I get to sit at the computer.  Wait, something may be a little unbalanced here.  

He finds really cool things on his grand explores.  Of course, he notices things that I would just probably trip over. Old fences are interesting.  The first thing that's notable about them is they are very often smack dab in the middle of the woods.  Healso finds many piles of stacked rocks out in the forest.  A lot of the land back here was once pasture.  When the farming population started to fall off the trees grew up.  Much of the fence remained.  Some farmers built meticulous fence, fence that has endured now probably two generations.  Larry would be that kind of fence builder.  Built to last, well thought out, painstakingly constructed.  Some fences were built what appears to be more randomly.  I call it artistic and creative.  Wrapping around trees and up and down hills.  The ADD and impulsive way to enclose your land.  Maybe the ground was too rocky to put post holes in, so you nailed your fencing to a poplar tree.  Maybe you didn't have the budget the meticulous guy had.  These fence builders probably had more fun in construction but they sure didn't have the staying power of the meticulous fence.  And they probably weren't too effective in corralling your cattle.  Guess which fence builder I would be?  Ahhh....it makes for an interesting relationship.

He also found a cool old rusty Chevrolet truck with a tree growing up through the middle of it.  It comes with the property.  No extra charge.  The truck probably isn't going anywhere soon.  That tree has a 16" diameter and probably stands 50' high.  I'm not sure it would run anyway. :)  A photo is on our website www.floydvirginialand.com on Tract 3N Remainder,  in case you're interested.

But, this story is about balloons.  On more than a few occasions he finds balloons.  Once he found a National Weather Service balloon high up in a tree.  With just the right stick he struck it down and found a prize.  It had been launched from the Blacksburg VA office and had electronic gear and a self-addressed stamped envelope for the return of said tracking gear and data collector.  Pretty cool, as I was saying.

Then just the other day he noticed a huge pile of really colorful balloons over in the Overlook.  The cluster held about 20 business cards thanking the balloon recipients for attending Piney Grove Baptist Church's Fish Fry and commissioning them to be fishers of men.  Well, we don't have a Piney Grove around these Blue Ridge Mountains.  A Sandy Level and a Rocky Bottom and a Flat Top but no Piney Grove.  So, of course, we googled it.  There was a phone number but no area code.  So I put the phone number in google search, along with the Piney Grove Baptist Part.  AHA!  A match!  Seems our balloons had traveled all the way from  Cottondale,  Florida, a tiny town on the border of Alabama and Georgia.  An 11 hour drive.  Almost 700 miles away.

I was able to reach Pastor Rich last Sunday morning before the men's prayer breakfast.   He said the fish fry was about 2 1/2 weeks ago, and they had an unbelievable turnout of 120 folks!  He remembered the balloons getting loose, not intentionally but they escaped from some kid's greasy fish hands.  So these colorful beauties must have gotten a fierce updraft (did we have some hurricane in there somewhere?) and cruised 700 miles or so in a little over two weeks.  I told Pastor Rich that his outreach was much greater than the deacons could ever have planned for.

So when you are out hiking through these gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains, keep an eye out for history.  Sometimes old and rusty, sometimes new and colorful.
l 

LADIES WHO LUNCH OR A QUICK COMMUTE NORTH ON THE BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY

Emma's in town.  College sure seems to have more breaks than I remember, back in the day.  We went home at Thanksgiving if we had a ride; and I guess everyone made it home for Christmas.  In those days you could fly Piedmont direct from Roanoke to Newark for 99 bucks and in an hour and a half  you could start out meandering on the Blue Ridge Parkway and end up barreling down  Route 22 in the fast lane, which by the way was every lane.  Hmmm...

Anyway, we are both happy.   The three hour drive from Boone seems to make  us appreciate each other so much more.  Senior year of high school had her searching for independence and me trying to figure out what  that meant for a stay at home mom with her youngest flying the coop.  We're at a real good place, although that makes us miss the heck out of each other.

Ah but I digress.  I've really come to talk to you about lunch.  Funky little big town Roanoke has an abundance of fabulous eateries.   We've got stuff for locavores (haha, spellcheck doesn't know that word yet, I'm cooler than spellcheck!), bagel joints, Indian restaurants and Thai places.  When we first moved here I had to have friends fedex bagels from NJ.  Indian and Thai in 1982?  Not in this town.  But now, Roanoke has evolved into the great foodie city it was always destined to become.  We still don't have Trader Joes or Anthropologie.  But then what would vacation be for?

There is however, a problem of decision for ladies that lunch.  But not for Emma and me.  We are Wasabi sushi freaks.  I first ate sushi in 1982 in NYC.  There were two sushi places in all of New York then.  My dad and I would meet for lunch at the one at about 57th and 3rd?  Since then I've obsessively eaten sushi all over the world...I guess most impressively in Singapore and Hong Kong.  Never made it to Tokyo but at least that's somewhere in the whole Asian neighborhood.

What I'm getting at is this.  I have NEVER EVER NEVER had better sushi than the Wasabi special across from the City Market in downtown Roanoke.  Seriously.  WASABI ROCKS!  I recently brought my Floridian northern transplant mother down to Wasabi.  I had been doing the old "yeah, this sushi is good, but Wasabi is better!" deal on her for years.  She being a stuck-up Yankee food snob, had been like "yeah, whatever."  She was to her surprise converted that fateful day back in the middle of June.

Well, gotta go.  Guess you know where Emma and I are going to be,  say around 12:30?

TRUE CONFESSIONS OF A MOUNTAIN MAMA

www.floydvirginialand.com

Have I mentioned lately that we sell land?  I do confess that's really why I'm here.  I've realized lately that I'm just not that interesting.  I do, however, lead a colorful life, enhanced by a hefty portion of familial nuttiness, Attention Deficit Disorder (which I do consider a gifting, btw) and some kick-butt beautiful surroundings here on top of this mountain.

We started living simply because we really had no other choice.  Both Larry and I are transplants from the northeast:  me by way of Des Moines, IA, Bad Homburg, Germany and Paris, France, but Larry is a Union County, NJ lifer.  We along with the rest the children in our town of Westfield, NJ watched our dads jump on the train to NYC every morning at 5:30 and 7:00AM respectively.  We piled into the car with our Vista Cruiser driving mothers to pick up the hardworking cocktails-on-the-train-slamming dads at the station at 6:30-7:00PM. We did suburbia quite well.  

But we wanted something different for our family.  Not necessarily better, just different.  I went to Roanoke College in Salem, VA back in the fall of 76.  Larry, who had either fallen in love with me or with the Blue Ridge Mountains, visited often until I graduated in 1980.  For a couple of years I moved back home and commuted with my dear old dad into midtown Manhattan.  Larry was working in New Providence, NJ as a prototype machinist and making some good jack for the early 80's.  He, along with his buddy Craig,  actually invented the machine that rolled and packaged the poster of Farrah in the red bathing suit.  Well, somebody had to do it.

But as we started thinking marriage and settling down and all of that grown up kind of stuff, we longed for the mountains.  Larry looked into buying a hardware store in Lexington, VA.  How different our lives would have been if that had panned out.  Instead, he found a small retail business in Salem that needed a new owner.  RISE, Roanoke Independent Sources of Energy.  Pretty cool.  Two transplanted Yankees selling woodstoves and solar panels in 1982.  Did I mention that he had a great big fro and I wore a lot of gauzy dresses?  We were a little late for Woodstock but we rode the fringes.

Fast forward almost 30 years.  We never left.  When we discovered Bent Mountain and the 20 minute no- traffic commute to Roanoke, we were hooked.  People think we live way out of town.  That amuses me.  I grew up 20 miles outside of New York City that took about 2 hours to commute.  I am in town in 20 minutes, about 15 miles away.  You do the math.

So anyway, we have a bit of that dream that we had over 30 years ago to sell to you.  Yes, we sell land.  Beautiful SW Virginia mountain land that has been lovingly protected and thoughtfully divided into large acreage tracts that overlook other big tracts, all the way to heaven.