Doug In Roanoke

All my first cousins are a generation older than I am.  In adulthood, I got to know Doug best during Thanksgivings at his home in Reedville, on the Chesapeake Bay, during the nineties. He and Anne, his second wife, eventually moved to Roanoke, a charming city in southwest Virginia.  Not long after Anne died, I drove down through the Shenandoah Valley to pay my respects.

Our grandfather on my mother's side, a locomotive engineer, would have felt right at home in Roanoke. When coal fueled a rapidly industrializing America, the city was a major rail center.

Architects still pay homage to the tracks of the Norfolk and Western Railway in their building designs.

Mill Mountain offers wonderful views of downtown Roanoke, today a lovely, midsize city that a hundred thousand people call home.  Health care, government and education employ most of them.

We dined at the famed wiener restaurant.

For locavores, there's a farmer's market nearby, too.  Pretty as a peach, indeed!

H&C Coffee has a storied history in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee.  The company roasted its beans in Roanoke until a flood wiped out the factory in the mid eighties.  Only the colorful neon sign survived.  You should see it at night!