2018-5-5 – Graham Ordinary

I’m up early, as has become my habit on the road since I go to bed early and the sun wakens one while camping.  In this case it’s also because of Frederick, the name I’ve given to the multi-colored rooster who was impelled by the first slight decrease in the dark country night at five AM to take responsibility for rousing everyone and everything within auditory range.  

As luck would have it, I had kept the earplugs we wore at the Martin guitar factory.  Those and a thick pillow turned crowing into an incidental part of a strange dream in which I was being driven around an unnamed, but oddly familiar city in someone’s car.  Take that, Frederick. 

Now I’m up, though, looking out over the misty, rolling Virginia lowland from my bedroom at Graham Ordinary, high on the slopes just off the Blue Ridge Parkway.  In Puritan Massachusetts during the early American colony days, a tavern was referred to as an “ordinary.”  John and his son Jim have taken on this term for their Airbnb, which seems appropriate since the earliest part of the structure dates from the 1700’s.  Other sections are from the 1800’s and early 1900’s.  

It is modest, welcoming and extensively hand-crafted, obviously a labor of love.  The walls, the bathroom, the bed have all been carefully constructed – sturdy, but with polished attention to detail; sophisticated rustic, not some fancy Victorian place.  It is also a small hillside working farm, with a pair of pigs, some goats and many chickens, including Frederick.  All in all, it’s an interesting and charming place to stay, should you find yourself needing accommodations near the Peaks of Otter.

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