Spring Road Trip Day 4 - Monday March 13th - Lynchburg VA - 6.5 miles walking lots of stairs and hills

Lynchburg VA is a gem.  The town is set on steep hills with the James River going through the middle of it.  We started out by having breakfast at Biscuitville.  We then returned to the hotel and walked up Monument Terrace which was very tall.  The landings on the flights of stairs are each dedicated to veterans from Lynchburg from a different war.  One level also has a rose garden off to one side.  At the top sits the Lynchburg Museum which is in the town’s 2nd courthouse. The original courthouse was very small and was on the same site as the museum sits now.  They have since built yet another courthouse making the 2nd one available to be a museum.

We’re my mother with us she would have found the interpretive sign about PFC Desmond Thomas Doss interesting since it detailed how a conscientious objector, a Seventh Day Adventist during WWII, was able to save many lives and received high honors etc.

Since it was open we went through the museum.  The exhibits were well done and the staff seemed really interested in representing the town and its history.  Brian and I found the section on suffragists interesting. Near our home in NY there is a town, Seneca Falls, which was the setting for an important meeting in the fight for women to get the vote.  Brian even took our friend Jim there last time he was up to visit.  One thing they don’t talk about there but that I knew from watching PBS’s very well done (if a bit long) ‘The Vote’ was that some of the most prominent suffragist groups were not interested in getting the vote for all women, just white women.  The Lynchburg Museum talks about this and talks about the organizations that were splintered off to include (maybe even focus on) voting for all races.

After the museum we walked to a few points we read about AT the museum including the neighborhood where the first 3 black voters to be registered in Lynchburg lived.  This was on the way to the highest point in Lynchburg which features a monument to a Major in the Confederate army who later became a Senator for the state of Virginia.  He is referred to, in a very out of date way, as the ‘Lame Lion’.

As if the highest point wasn’t enough verticality for us we then walked along the bluff walk above the James and then finally down to river level to walk along the greenway they have built on a former railroad right of way.  It was sunny and bright but breezy and cool at the same time. The scenery was great, there was almost nobody out and about and everything was clean and peaceful.  

We had lunch at our hotel then took a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway making a loop back to Lynchburg over maybe 50 miles.  We tried driving on the Parkway once before but it was very foggy and we couldn’t go very far before running into a closure gate for ice and snow.  Again this time we started near one gate that was closed and drove 20 or so beautiful curvy miles climbing up to about 2500 feet looking down long valleys etc until we came to another closed gate and returned on fantastically fun US-60 and some other roads.  US-60 was extremely curvy and Brian was a little green after the first twenty 30 MPH steeply banked s-curves.  

 

We finished our evening off by buying shoes at the mall and having a simple dinner at Chick-Fil-A.  Maybe it was the sun or a little too much exercise (or in my case, the nap I had in the afternoon) but neither of us slept well after all that.  Still, every aspect of Lynchburg was delightful from the people to the scenery to the exercise.  I hope to come back.