The Burger Joint’s name is already taken in Charlottesville by the guys that opened The Burger Joint in DC. The restaurant owners of the new corner spot have been throwing around ideas for a long time, but now that it’s set to open soon they need some help figuring out the name.
What should they name it?
Pick up a copy of this month’s Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine and you’ll see the Beat the Heat section by Graham Averill. The picture of the girl sliding down one of the rock slides inspires you to want to go on a hike. Saturday 3 friends and I were on a mission to find these beautiful rock slides. The map in the Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine is less then helpful, there are no road names, it’s a blank map with 10 random points on the map showing the east coast and different places to hike. Stop by Blue Ridge Mountain Sports in the Barracks Shopping Center to talk with the expert, the man that we talked to loves to get outside and be active and he was very knowledgeable on the roads we needed to take to get to the Cedar Run hike and falls. It’s not just as easy as getting on the skyline drive, the roads were windy and it’s very remote. We went through Madison to get there and the drive was beautiful. There is a place in Madison to stop and get apples and fresh fruit, other than that the road we were on looked like it was made for one car. It takes about 30 minutes from Charlottesville to get there.
A season pass to the Shenandoah National Park is $30(they take credit cards), it’s a great deal because it includes all the trails and is good for your whole car load of friends. The park ranger at the bottom of the mountain was helpful and let us know that we were going to follow the blue trail up the mountain. There were only a couple turns and one point we had to cross over a little bit of water, it was a fun hike. The ranger told us there was 100% chance of thunderstorms before we started hiking. The first rock slide you come to is amazing, there is a huge drop from the top into about 6 feet of water. You hit your feet on the bottom. We jumped off the rocks on the opposite side of the trail and the water takes your breath away, but is also refreshing and supposedly a lot warmer than usual. Sure enough we had thunderstorms, but that actually made the day even more fun. I would recommend hiking up to the second rock slide, it didn’t look so dangerous and was a smooth slide into the water.
Some hikers we ran into thought it would be funny to tell us that there was a loop you could hike so that we wouldn’t have to go back the same way we hiked up the mountain…bad idea. The loop is about a 25 mile hike. If you just hike up to the slides and then turn around it’s only about 5-6 miles. I would recommend this to anyone, it was so beautiful and remote and we didn’t see a lot of people. Cedar Run is right around the corner from Charlottesville and it’s really something amazing to see.
What’s your favorite place to hike?
Last night I went to the fair… it’s my new favorite out of the Virginia fairs I’ve visited. It was so organized. There were 5 parking lot(actually parking field watch out for the cow patties) attendants on a Tuesday night, great service, and you didn’t have to pay to park! Admission is $7 per person($3 for kids), but worth it because it was so much more fun than a movie. There were so many food vendors, I wished I hadn’t eaten, but everything smelled and looked so tasty. They had huge gyros, grilled chicken salads, kielbasa (a spicy piece of sausage), along with the usual suspects: fries, corndogs, funnel cakes, cotton candy, and kettle corn.
————————————————————————————–
The petting zoo and 4H portion was a big production, 4 separate tents of animals. The chickens were labeled with their prizes from previous years, chicks, shaved and unshaven sheep, goats were walking around, I guess pigs bite so they were in cages, rabbits, cows, 2 bulls, horses, and 4 llamas. The lady took the llama out of the pin for me to pet and it was just like a big dog it wanted to get really close to my face and it was so curious. She just kept the llamas as pets but she said they can also be used for protection (against coyotees and dogs) for your livestock. I didn’t realize they were so friendly.
———————————————————————————–
There were a lot of booths set up too for different Charlottesville businesses like UVA, retirement communities, planned parenthood, tractors, rhino liner(for the bed of your truck) and the marine corp. I won a marine corp tshirt for staying above the pull up bar for more than 30 seconds. I think I kind of cheated, I was kicking to make myself stay up. HA! Boys have to do 20 pull ups to get a tshirt(we got 2)! Do girls really lack the muscle to do pull ups? I think it’s weird that girls just have to have their chin above the pull up bar for a minimum of 30 seconds, the minimum for boys is 7 or 8 pull ups(to qualify to go into the marine corp), that doesn’t seem equal.
The Albermarle County Fair kicks off tonight at 6 pm. You can ride all the rides for $10 for the whole night. The fair will be going on all weekend. You can get a coupon here for discounted tickets for the other nights. The fair will open at 6pm today- Friday, 12pm on Saturday and 1pm on Sunday. There is entertainment: bluegrass, country, rock, gospel and soul. 4-H is also a part of the event. Directions
I went by The Burger Joint on Saturday afternoon and they were hard at work getting things ready to open. They decided to change things around with the kitchen layout and an air vent and it has pushed back the opening date since it ended up creating a lot more work and complications with building codes. Now it looks more like a mid-August opening instead of the 1st.
Tonight the 8-piece Charlottesville band Alligator will be playing at Fridays after Five. The band plays early 60s and 70s Grateful Dead music. The most popular Fridays after Five events always seem to be Grateful Dead cover bands, last year you couldn’t even get through the crowd to get on the grass. I think the Pavilion does a great job booking bands and making Fridays one of my favorite things about Charlottesville (so I’m not complaining), but I always wonder why other bands that are popular in the US don’t stop at Charlottesville to play for a Fridays. I think it would be great publicity to play for an event like Fridays. I think some bands I love are so generous (Dave Matthews Band funding the $20,000 fireworks display a few years ago) but why not instead of throwing money when something like that comes up, come show your love for Charlottesville and play just for the fun of it! It would generate so much positive talk about your group if someone played at a Fridays After Five. What do you think?
The Orange County Fair is the only fair in the nation held at a Presidential home. The inexpensive fair, $6 admission for adults, provides activities for everyone in the family. The fair opens at 3 on Thursday and Friday and 8:30 am Saturday and Sunday, it closes at 10 except Saturday when it closes at 11pm and 4pm Sunday night. The weekend includes raffles, frog jumping contests, pig racing, cow milk contests, pie contests, clogging, fiddle playing, auctions, and lot more to keep you busy for the weekend (full schedule here.)
Sometimes it is hard to give your kids a ride to everywhere they need to go in Charlottesville, but the new Fun Bus will make it possible for them to participate in the events that they would like. The bus is a collaboration between the Piedmont Council of the Arts and The University of Virginia to provide a way to drop kids off and pick them up from sporting events at parks in the Charlottesville area.
This weekend, July 17-19th a lot of downtown mall businesses will be participating in the annual sidewalk sale. Here is a list of the participating vendors.
The New York Times published an article yesterday titled “What you Get for …$700,000,” Charlottesville(well actually Scottsville) made the line up of three homes along with Orlando and Tuscon. The home that was picked is a 2,083 square foot log cabin that sits on 45 acres of land. The property is currently listed with Charlottesville Country Properties 434-964-0406 with Bill Martin.
