Bob Neal

Travel broadens both the mind and the rear end, unless you travel on foot.

I don’t travel on foot, but in this post-pandemic time my itchy feet are telling me to hit the road again. But to where? To do what? New experiences? Redo old experiences?

Travel often focuses on scenery. The Grand Canyon. The Flint Hills of Kansas. I focus on scenery, too, but also on people and culture. You gotta talk with locals if you wanna know the place. None of the 47 other states I’ve seen is more interesting than Maine, but a few come close.

I narrowed to three a list of interesting states. Minnesota, North Carolina and Virginia. Minnesota for Scandinavian culture and terrific cities, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth. North Carolina for diverse culture, mountains and the Outer Banks. But I settled on Virginia.

I’ve traveled to or through the Old Dominion about 40 times, first in 1964 when a snowstorm stranded me near Washington, D.C., and finally in 2015. Most of those trips were to pick up baby turkeys in West Virginia, back in my farming days. But my late wife and I also vacationed four times in Virginia. Three of the four were terrific.

It’s hard to imagine a more scenic long drive than the trip through the Shenandoah Valley. On Interstate 81 or, if you have the time, on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which has no trucks.

History pulls me strongly to Virginia. Two revolutions played out there, one awesome, one awful. The American Revolution ended with Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, and the Civil War ended with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse.

At Appomattox, my wife and I walked where Maine’s Gen. Joshua Chamberlain accepted the surrender of rebel arms on April 9, 1865. The park today looks like photos of surrender day.

Fifty years after seeing history in the form of confederate statues in Richmond, I watch in glee as the statues come down. When it came to moving the Robert E. Lee statue, only a Black-owned company would do it. I love the irony of a Black crew knocking Lee off his pedestal. Literally.

The tussle over statues reflects divisions that persist in our country and help make Virginia interesting. Virginia seems to manage the divisions, like two pigs wrestling in a guinea sack. Or “gunny sack” as they might say there. Virginia has voted Democratic for president since 2008, mostly Democratic for governor (until 2019), but kept its legislature Republican until 2022.

To compound things, Virginia in 1989 became the first state since reconstruction to elect a Black governor, Douglas Wilder, a pro-choice Democrat.

America’s charms seldom lie in its small cities. But we found an exception: Staunton. It was named after Lady Rebecca Staunton. Don’t pronounce the “u.” Virginians all call it “Stanton.”

We found this remarkable city of 25,000 when stopping for lunch on one of 30 or so trips to pick up baby turkeys. The main drag, Beverley Street, is lined with restaurants, most of which I have sampled, and we made it a point to stop on every future trip.

Food is just the beginning. History permeates here, too. The Frontier Culture Museum is a living-history museum saluting the four Shenandoah Valley cultures, African, German, English, Irish. Each “village” depicts the culture emigrants left and how they built new lives here.

Staunton was the birthplace of Thomas Jonathon “Stonewall” Jackson and Woodrow Wilson. I find neither appealing, but we visited Wilson’s birthplace, mostly because my mother believed my father had descended from Wilson. I’m pleased that we can find no evidence of that.

Arts abound. My older son and I, on our final turkey trip, stayed in Staunton, ate at Zynodoa, the best restaurant I’ve ever been in, and attended a brass-band concert in Gypsy Hill Park. The concert is held every summer Monday, a throwback to when every town had a town band.

One arts site I’m yet to visit is the Statler Brothers Museum. The Statler Brothers backed up Johnny Cash for eight years and made their own recordings. As I write, an ear worm (“Counting Flowers on the Wall”) is running through my mind. The Statlers, two brothers and their two cousins, were from Staunton, and three of the four settled there in retirement. Locals tell me I might meet one of them walking down Beverley Street. But I probably wouldn’t recognize him.

Maine shares a Statler Brothers connection. The story is that when the quartet needed a name, one picked up a roll of Statler toilet tissue and said, “How about the Statler Brothers?” The roll was made by the Statler Tissue Co. in Augusta. Our Augusta, not Augusta, Virginia, which is the county that surrounds Staunton, an independent city.

I wasn’t the first poultry farmer on a pilgrimage to Polyface Farm, where Joel Salatin and his family grow natural poultry, eight miles out in the hills. Salatin, the guru of natural poultry growing, has written a dozen books about it. I’ve read four of them. One happy day, I met him, as he came in from the morning slaughter. We talked briefly, he went back to work, I bought another book and went on to West Virginia. I have lorded it over fellow farmers that I met him.

We had one bad Virginia trip, to a basketball game where Virginia Commonwealth University’s adult band leader led his musicians taunting UMaine’s players. One in 40 is pretty good.

Bob Neal can’t recall many places where he had bad food. Wolfville in Nova Scotia Evangeline country was one. It seems his taste buds lead his feet down the road. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.