May 21

We left on time today at 9am with sunny skies. Although our mileage would be less than 200 miles, we had nine Grand Tour of VA stops to visit. Our first two stops were in Wytheville, the local Harley dealership and the Visitor’s Center. With those easily accomplished, we rode 45 minutes to Independence, VA on US 21, enjoying the scenery along the way.

Fox Creek Leather was our third stop of the morning, a new Grand Tour location just on the outskirts of Independence, VA. The local dog greeted us with enthusiasm.

The store had high quality leather products and smelled great inside! From there we headed over to the Courthouse for the next stamp, and then on to the Blue Ridge Plateau Visitor’s Center. We really enjoyed our visit there last year, as the lady inside again gave us a great lunch recommendation. The center also has nice local artwork and items for sale (shopping for Michele!). Outside we met a couple from Farmville riding a blue Victory Vision, also on the Grand Tour. They were doing the same stops as us but in the opposite direction.

Our recommended lunch destination was in Hillsville at the local diner. It was a true old counter-style diner in the family for three generations, and the local folks and waitress all knew each other by name. Lots of "honey" and "sweetie" said here, much more friendly than northern VA.

Onward, our next stop was the Poor Farmer’s Market. Michele gets a kick out of these country stores with old time candies, local jams and various oddities for sale. We found the Poor Farmer himself and Michele gave a friendly hello.

Back on the road we found more twisties and scenery heading towards Martinsville.

The Martinsville visitor’s center turned out to be a great surprise for Michele, with a lot of local artist items for sale and on display. It's unusual these days finding items not made in China!

We had about 50 more miles to the Virginia International Raceway, our next stop of the day. VIR is in a fairly remote section of Virginia, and you actually have to go into North Carolina to get to the track which is in Virginia. Our last stop of the day would be in South Boston, VA about 20 miles away at Ed’s Honda dealership.

The guys in the store were very friendly and quite the characters. We got a local dinner recommendation at the Village Café about 4 miles away. The Honda guy told us that we might have to get a few pies since it’s hard to choose. He was right--we got coconut since strawberry was already gone by 6:30pm!

We had good riding weather today with mostly cloudy skies and the high about 80 degrees. For our picture of the day at a particularly interesting “Y” in the road, which route do you think we took??

Tomorrow is our final day of our trip. We plan on getting 6 additional stamps and hope to miss the predicted thunderstorms.