Taking A Walk

by Dwayne Phillips

Today we walked through Mt Jackson and New Market, Virginia. We covered 15 miles. The weather was in the mid-50s in the morning and the mid-80s in the afternoon. Still quite pleasant.

Most of the day was out in rural areas. Highway 11 is by no means desolate. We are always in sight of a farm house or a business on the highway. But there are times when towns are several hours walk apart.

Mt Jackson is so small that it doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. I am surprised as the town is fairly large. What differentiates it from the other towns we have seen so far is that it is a railroad town. Railroad tracks run north-south through the center of town. The town itself stretches a long way north-south.

The first prize of the day was this bridge crossing the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. It is rare to find this type of trestle bridge these days as most have been replaced by the bland concrete overpass.

The next find of the day (actually found it last night) is the Southern Kitchen in New Market. The Southern Kitchen is a fine example of a mid-twentieth century style restaurant. It comes complete with a nightly special. I had the Wednesday-night special of all you can eat fried chicken wings. A good meal, one you won’t find at a national chain restaurant.

One side note – many of the businesses in these towns are open Thursday through Sunday. Those are the days that people escape the rat race of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area and come out to the countryside. They must wander up and down the streets of these small towns on the weekend. Good for the small towns – take all the big-city money you can get. Believe me, it is almost impossible to find a hotel room on Highway 11 or Interstate 81 on the weekends. This holds for the entire length of these roads down to the Tennessee border. This is crazy, but true. Ask anyone (like me) who has been burned out here on a weekend desperately seeking a hotel room of any type.

The prize of the day is a statue of a turkey – yes a turkey. See the photo! This is inside Rockingham County. Rockingham County is the turkey capital of the U.S. I have seen news reports that a live turkey enters one of Rockingham’s processing plants and departs a frozen turkey on the way to a supermarket one hour later. There are turkey farms everywhere and turkey processing plants here and there in the county.

I looked at the Wikipedia page for Rockingham County and found this under “Points of Interest:”

Two Turkey statues, one at either end of Route 11 signal that you are in the “Turkey Capital.” Rockingham county is the leader of Virgina in poultry production.

There is another one of these “statues” on the south end of the county. I cannot wait to get down there.

Can you imagine being a sculptor and someone coming to you wanting you to make a turkey statue? Hey, its a paycheck.

But why aren’t these things in a town square somewhere? Why on Highway 11?