[I'm putting it up as a web page http://www.hudsoncity.net/temporary/ashland.html since some AOL people still can't get embedded images in their mail.  Most of the pictures open full size when you double click them]

I had gotten a free entrance ticket to King's Dominion and took a drive down there. After having checked their schedule for the opening times and after having being assured it was open and after having driven 75 miles, I pulled up to the gate and the park was closed. Although I hadn't been expecting that, I had thought the ticket might have been a come on and was still going to cost something, so I had made back-up plans and followed them the rest of the day.

I drove a few miles over to Ashland, about 15 miles north of Richmond and known - by the  Chamber of Commerce - as The Center of the Universe.

It's a small compact town, about 6,500, that had begun as a 19th Century resort and spa for Richmond before the Civil War, a training and hospital center during the war and the battle of North Anna, and became a rail commuter suburb of Richmond in the late 19th Century.

The built up part of the town is shaped like the letter P, with the RF&P/CSX railroad running in the middle of the main north-south street [the back of the P] and Randolph Macon College forming the P's bulge on the east side.

The railroad tracks, the main north south corridor on the  East Coast, run down the main street; about every 40 or 50 feet there are wooden walkways to cross the tracks from one side of the street to the other; on about every third or fourth street you can also drive across the tracks.

[To get a clearer idea of the town, click this link http://www.angelfire.com/va3/GT360/tourism.html  for a  360 degree view that opens in a new window; it's very good but whether you choose  high speed or low speed, it loads very slowly so you might want to come back to it after it finishes loading completely.]

Just as I parked my car and started walking to the tourist office, northbound Amtrak 94 from Newport News on the way to New York  and Boston came down the street, stopping right at the entrance to the college. There are about 6 passenger trains northbound that stop [and about 3 passengers trains on the Florida routes that don't stop], all in the morning, and then the same number of passenger trains southbound in the afternoon and early evening. More service is returning in December.

I started at the north side of town, where the college campus abuts the main part of the town and where  the tourist information office is located in the RF&P / Amtrak station. The woman had a genteel Southern lady accent. A  local who came in to complain about tree limbs from the hurricane not being picked up, had a vulgar southern accent. 

I did learn from the woman why King's Dominion was closed that day. After Labor Day the park shuts down except for weekends; since they're normally closed on weekdays, they don't list them as "closed" days in their schedule.

After gathering tourist and history brochures on the town I went over to the Ashland Coffee and Tea Company to read them before starting out. The coffee house is very large and also has a listening room / auditorium for shows on the weekends. The interior and "decor" are very similar to Micha's in Old Town, except this place is physically much larger. There are about a dozen kinds of coffee; theoretically there also are a dozen kinds of tea but most of the teas are just  flavors-in-cheap-tea blends.  I did have a Formosa Oolong [$1.50] and it was served nicely in a crockery cup on a small crockery tablet/tray. The place also serves lunch but at 11:30 there were only three other customers, a student and his parents.

After having read the guides and gotten organized, I started out at the Henry Clay Inn [Henry Clay was born in the area] at the north end of town. It's ante-bellum in style but built in 1992 as a replica of a previous inn but with high speed modem links, dataports, Jacuzzis, cable television and business conference rooms. There were, in fact, two previous inns but one was burned down at the turn of the century and one burned down later on. But unless you knew that, the place, at least the lobby where I was and the exterior, could be a genuine 19th century building. It's unlikely that I'd ever stay there but the room rates are no more than at a Hampton Inn; they do have a public brunch on Saturdays and Sundays which looked interesting, but 75 miles one way is a long way to go [even if I added in the weekend Chicken House gospel sing to have more to do].

Walking northwards along the main street/railroad tracks you can see that the college has taken over for offices most of the private residences fronting the street. A freight train went by and I crossed the tracks over to the college campus.

Randolph Macon College has a central campus about eight by eight blocks square. There are around 1,100 students and now it is no longer a women's college but coeducational; I'm not sure how Methodist it still is. I was surprised at the low number of students because the campus is so well designed and attractive and obviously cost a lot. In fact, if you cut out the original Jefferson core from the University of Virginia, Randolph Macon looks far better, not to mention looking far far better than the University of Maryland. [I looked up the cost: $20,000 tuition + $3,500 room + $2,800 board.]

Besides the campus being attractive, so were the students: their clothing was typical unstylish but clean and not sloppy. At one point I was walking in step with a group of 3 of them and heard a girl say to a male student: "That's one class I can't fall asleep in". I expected the next line to be something like: I really need the course for my biology degree. or I've always found inorganic chemistry fascinating. or The professor is such a riveting lecturer. Instead, her whole statement was: "That's one class I can't fall asleep in; the noise of the construction next door is so loud it keeps me awake."

There are several late 19th Century Italianate buildings that form the core of the campus and then another square with a very attractive fountain. As I said earlier, the Amtrak train station is AT the entrance to the campus. As I walked away from downtown, the class room and administration buildings petered out but the college has crept out at least three blocks on one of the the main cross streets, College Avenue, taking over the private houses [in Neo-Ante-Bellum style] and turning them into offices.

After the campus I was going to have lunch at Suzanne's Bakery and Luncheonette. When I walked into it, all the tables were filled and there was a line at the order counter in front of the open kitchen. Most importantly, the line consisted of 5 women, probably as old as I am or even younger, but acting older. They were from a tour group or maybe grandparents of students, looking dazed --- and that was before anyone had even asked them to make a decision on a sandwich. I knew this was going to be a slow line and so I left and went on sightseeing, following the walking tour down main street.

There's about 3/4 of a mile or a mile of the walking tour  to look at the architecture. The first two blocks are commercial, including a "world food" store that was 96% wines - many local ones - and unusual beers. The entire area seems to be filling up with vineyards and wineries, which have expanded southwards from Winchester and Loudon. After those first blocks the street along the railroad becomes completely residential. The only things that are more than of local interest are the race course location [from when the town was a spa] which had been turned into a Confederate training ground and hospital and one house where Elmira, an early inamorata of Edgar Allen Poe lived; the relationship ended when he went to college, although she's supposed to be the female character in his Tamerlane. "We grew in age- and love- together, / Roaming the forest, and the wild; "

On the way back I stopped at the public library to check my e-mail . I was walking back and forth a lot across the tracks; train traffic wasn't continuous but there was one about one every half hour. I wonder if there's any place on the main Hamburg-Berlin or Paris-Lyon lines where the trains run through the middle of a street?

 It's about a ½ mile walk down and a ½ mile walk back for the tour and after it I went back to Suzanne's. Now there were a few empty tables but there was still a line to get food, a line of three blue-haired women [not the same ones] who I knew were going to take forever. 

So I went to The Ironhorse Restaurant for lunch. It's a refurbished commercial building with industrial decor that could be in Georgetown or Manhattan. Basically American food, emphasizing meat, with a very large selection of beers, including Jever Pils, one of my favorites but which I couldn't drink because I was driving.

The soup of the day was potato soup which I would normally have ordered but unfortunately it was garlicked. So I just got the day's special: pork loin and cheese and pickle on toasted white bread. $8.95, more expensive than lunch here. Had a fairly long conversation with the waitress which she opened by referring to my web notes that I had made in preparation of the trip.  She seemed to think I was some sort of food critic or travel writer because of the notes I had brought with me and I explained to her that most of it came from chowhound.com . I learned that the town was so hard hit by the hurricane that the college had been shut down, the students sent home, and the college had just re-opened. 

I walked a few doors down to the ice cream parlor - and it was an ice cream parlor - the Whistle Stop Cafe. It wasn't in the ice cream parlor style of Jersey City [black marble and orange lights and banquettes] but more like what had been in the Maryland suburbs like Gifford's and Weile's [with fluorescent lighting and tables and chairs]. There even was a real soda fountain in it. Although they had fancy gelato, I wanted to try the peach ice cream which was a local brand I hadn't heard of before, Garber's. The scoop was not the little scoop you get now but the size of one from the past and cost $1.35. Very good peach ice cream and it took me a long while to eat it because of it's size. Talking with the girl behind the fountain, probably a student, she had a bland American accent, while the older man managing it had an educated Southern one.

As a tourist, not a shopper, I then went to Cross Brothers Grocery which I expected to be a general store but which turned out to be a small [family owned and operated] supermarket.

I made a third attempt at Suzanne's, just as it was closing. Now there was no line waiting to order; there were empty seats; but there still was a line of one at the cash register. I ordered a sugar cookie [$1] which turned out to be very good quality but which I didn't care for and a slice of apple pie which I ate the next day and which was outstanding and better than even the pies from the local bakeries here, not to mention those from supermarkets.

Waiting to pay, the line [of one] was moving very slowly. A 20 year old nicely but worker-dressed white woman was waiting on a 20 year old nicely dressed in business clothes black woman. Both had the Southern belle accent [even with thank-you-kindly vocabulary] but the black woman carried it off better. It was a long, slow transaction. [What I had been noticing about the English - the little that I heard - was that the young women and men, probably from the college, and the 30-50 year old men, maybe outlanders, tended to speak bland television English. The women who were older than college age spoke some variant of Southern belle; the men over fifty had a slow, heavy, vulgar, unpleasant dialect ... and much different than the common dialect in the Shenandoah.]

On the way out, driving one block, I made a final stop at Williams Bakery which is a local chain of four bakeries operating in the Ashland / Hanover area. I bought a cinnamon surprise to eat later in the day and a peach pie to bring home. The pie [$5 or $6, while the same size ones at Suzanne's had cost $8-9] turned out to be wonderful; as packed with fruit as the Suzanne's apple pie slice was. I was talking a little to the woman running the bakery and a customer and asked if they carried crumb buns. She had no idea what I meant until I went into a long description. She knows it only as a whole crumb cake [which they don't carry]. [According to Chowhound THE local restaurant in Ashland is Smokey's Barbecue which should have been one block from where I was but which I never found.]

About 6 or 6 miles to the east is Hanover Courthouse, the county seat. When you reach the crossroads, there is  an early 18th Century courthouse, now a museum, surrounded by grass along with a 19th Century jail; a 19th Century inn; a series of government buildings set back from and not visible from the road. That's pretty much it. 

Foreign tourists probably wouldn't understand that this is a left over from the old agricultural South which had little town life and where the courts were just temporary gathering places and not in residential towns. 

From the post War period there is a Civil War Memorial, only officers above lieutenant listed, with a noteworthy inscription.

After taking some pictures and reading some historical markers I looked for the locally famous restaurant Houndstooth Cafe   but couldn't find it, even though nothing was blocking my view [Locals don't want you to know about the Houndstooth. They have a hard enough time getting tables in the 62-seat cafe. Spittin' distance from Hanover Courthouse, the Houndstooth is a veritable bar convention during lunch. In fact, notes Hanover County Common-wealth's Attorney Ed Vaughn, "We have attorneys coming to court from Northern Virginia who won't book cases on Mondays, because the Houndstooth is closed." And at night, when the lawyers have vacated, locals move in for some of the finest food in the region.

I decided to drive back on 301 and 2 through Fredericksburg, instead of going on the Interstate highway. It's mostly a two lane road, straight but rolling with a 55 mph limit passing through open land and greenery, Camp AP Hill and the Spotsylvania / Fredericksburg Battlefields. 

Traffic began getting heavy at Fredericksburg and trying to leave it at around for 430 or five the heavy traffic actually was in a frozen gridlock. The problem wasn't northbound US 1, but southbound US1 and people trying to turn onto cross roads to get to I-95. Because of the mess I stopped at the Virginia Barbeque Company on Route 1 for a sandwich. They offer three types: Virginia, North Carolina and Texas. I chose Virginia and found it very bland; then I remembered.: it tasted just like the barbeque at the Dixie Pig so I guess Virginia barbeque is bland.

I kept going home on Route 1, turned off for Mt Vernon and came up the last section on the Parkway along the river, getting home around 6:30pm.

360 degree view http://www.angelfire.com/va3/GT360/tourism.html 

civil war battlefields and training Patrick Henry's birthplace 7 - 8 miles westwards Old Sol get poison ivy