Travel Blog: Roanoke, VA (3)

With family living in Roanoke it was only natural to have more travels to the area. This time visiting for the birthday of a little one. Alyson and I started our travel at 5am on a Thursday to head all the way to the St. Pete to fly out of a different airport in order to get the direct flight from St. Pete -> Roanoke via Allegiant. This would be the first time Alyson and I had flown together and I warned her my travel isn't always the luckiest.

Sure enough as my movie ended and I look at the window - we are so close to the ground and airport. Its a bit cloudy and tough to see, but we are under 2,000 feet and closing in.

Moments later the engines rev up - we regain over 100mph and start ascending rapidly and banking in a large circle passed the airport. Immediately I look to Alyson and said something to the form of "We missed the airport".

As the confusion sets in the pilot comes over the speaker and says something like: Hello folks, as you can see we aborted landing due to a low ceiling and are currently circling the airport. We have a plane behind us who might be able to land - if they succeed we will give this another shot. If not, we don't have enough fuel and will go land at Greensboro, NC to refuel and come back as the heat will have burned off these clouds."

There was a row of kids behind us and they were talking about police and sirens on the runway - so now I'm getting confused what is going on. As we loop around the airport the pilot explains we are going to try again with a landing. We get closer and closer descending and we descend beneath the clouds that are floating at about 1,000ft. We finally have wheels hitting the tarmac and everyone starts clapping and cheering.

Turns out the kids were right - there are sirens on the runaway because 10 hours earlier a plane drove off the runaway at this exact airport during landing invoking an emergency safety system and investigation. Perhaps that plane suffered from the same low ceiling (low clouds) and landed a bit too far down the runaway and ran out of space to stop.

Maybe that incident invoked a bit of fear in our pilots who were dealing with a similar level of clouds. Thankfully though we landed in Roanoke without such an emergency.

We arrived early enough that not even lunch places were open so we went off to visit Mill Mountain on a random Thursday. The last time I visited the mountain was during Thanksgiving so I was expecting a far smaller crowd of people.

Thankfully as predicted it was nearly empty at 10:30am on a workday away from any holiday. This was a quick detour full of photos before we went onward to lunch at a pizza joint. Hungry from a morning of travel I forgot to take photos and devoured some wings & pizza.

For the rest of the day we explored the homes of parents & siblings and enjoyed some burgers before calling it night. The next morning arrived and it was time for Alyson and I to sneak out for a morning of hiking, but we knew we had a lunch at noon. So we looked for a relatively close short hike and ended up visiting the Roaring Run trail which was less than 15 minutes away from where we were staying.

We hiked through a slippery wet trail as we made it to the top of the waterfall for some excellent photos. Once at the top we noticed a beaten trail that no longer looked official, but pushed further on into more difficult climbs.

Sure enough as predicted - I slipped on a wet rock and landed on my butt and hands which hurt. So we decided to head on back at that point, but now we had to descend the wet rocks which was much more difficult than ascending. We made it back in one piece with no injuries and plenty of great photos while being the only humans on the trail.

So we started off on a drive back to the house and hit a one way construction zone that had a piece of technology that I've never seen before.

There was no crew member with a flag guiding traffic, but a temporary stoplight to guide traffic through this little stretch of one lane road. Of course as I sat at the red light attempting to get a photo - the light turned green. I'd never seen this before, but with sensors above the temporary light it seemed like a way more efficient mechanism than two people with radios.

We visited 1772 Rooftop on Main - a local Fincastle dining experience, but unfortunately they had a power surge/issue that fried the power to the rooftop. So we didn't get to experience the establishment as the locals intended instead sitting on the ground floor. Once again I failed to get food photos, but it was a nice dining experience for the area.

Afterwards our group split in different directions, so Alyson and I took one of the cars and went to a winery not more than 7 minutes from the sister's house. We arrived at Virginia Mountain Vineyards which I hadn't yet visited in warm weather so I was excited to enjoy some wines in a different climate.

I'm not a wine connoisseur to have any valid grounded feedback on the wines, but I enjoyed them. I tried the special holiday spice wine which honestly tasted nothing like wine, but was a fun different drink than the norm. It seems the place is not doing too well as the winery is for sale at 3.3 million. When we got there around 1pm the staff said we were the first people that day, then we left near close with only one other couple showing up.

Once done with some exploration we returned to the house for some burgers and prepared for the big birthday Saturday approaching. As Saturday came and went it was a ton of family & friends that showed up to celebrate the 1st birthday of the baby. Great food and conversations were had as many baby gifts were opened & built. We did escape at one point to view the farm animals who were semi-excited to see us.

All that socializing with family & friends took a toll on my energy so we passed out at about 10pm with an early flight back home on Sunday. Thankfully the trip home had no issues with only a minor delay and we landed back in Tampa at roughly 1pm. Plenty of time left in the day for a meal and chores / blog writing.

We didn't explore much of Roanoke on this visit - only the neighboring towns of Daleville & Fincastle so maybe when the 4th travel blog for Roanoke arrives that may change.