One Friday in the middle of May and very dear friend and I took a one day road trip all by ourselves and had a ball during the entire trip.

My very, very special friend, Carol Trutt

We had been planning for it a few months and when the day finally came it started with fierce thunderstorms and rain.  I don’t like to drive in the rain especially to areas I’m not familiar with and I was the designated driver on this trip.  When Carol got to my house it was a little later than we had planned and with the storms I thought maybe we would just head to Roanoke and spend the day looking in some of my favorite shops.  She was disappointed but understood why I didn’t want to drive further.  When we got to Salem we had breakfast at Denny’s and by the time we came out from breakfast the skies had cleared and we decided to head on to Staunton.

The main reason we wanted to go here is because several times a year there is a wonderful book fair and we are both avid readers and I had been here twice with my daughter   Carol had never been and boy was she in for a special treat!  We were headed to the Green Valley Book Fair.

The Green Valley Book Fair is a discount book outlet store featuring over 500,000 new books at incredible bargain prices. 

We spent about two hours there and both came out loaded with books, audio-books and more.

My daughter, the traveler, had prepared us a itinerary for the day and so our next stop was The Cheese Shop in Stuart’s Draft.  By the time we came out of here it was 3:30 p.m. and we had a two hour drive back home.  Loaded up with all kinds of baking goods, snacks, cheese and the famous cake donuts we headed home.  We had not eaten breakfast and we dug into the dozen donuts I picked up before we left the store.  Stuffed and loaded with sugar we got back home safely after a wonderful day of catching up and decided we would take the trip again later in the summer so we could hit some more of the shops we missed on this trip!

Carol, I love you, and thank you for making it such a special day for me since I don’t leave the farm very often!!