Taking A Walk

by Dwayne Phillips

Today we walked through Seven Mile Ford and Chilhowie, Virginia. We covered 12 miles. The weather was clear, sunny, and reached 85 degress F.

Seven Mile Ford is a wide spot in the road. It was pretty big for this type of town with businesses and several dozen brick homes. I stopped into the store shown here for a cup of coffee. They were out, but brewed me a fresh pot quickly. 50 cents for good, fresh coffee. Is anyone at Starbucks reading this? Coffee doesn’t have to cost $1.50.

This place has fresh produce, groceries, hardware, farm parts, and serves meals as well in booths inside. Today’s special was mashed potatoes with roast beef and gravy piled on top. I had already eaten lunch.

I put this photo on the Seven Mile Ford page on Wikipedia.

Chilhowie is a bigger town with three schools, half a dozen churches, shopping centers and such. Here is a photo of the Baptist Church on Route 11. I put this photo on the Chilhowie page on Wikipedia.

“Chilhowie” is an indian word meaning something like “valley full of deer.”

There were several historical markers in the area. In the 1750s, several people came to this place and built homes. That made this the western-most settlement in the New World at the time. Actually, the western-most English settlement as the Spanish were already in Santa Fe, New Mexico for decades, but Santa Fe is not on Route 11, so we won’t count that.

The treat of the day was when a couple of friends Jim and his wife Nadine ran into us (figuratively) in the early afternoon. They were driving from Tennessee back to Northern Virginia and knew about where we were on the road. It was fun to see them.

The humorous item was they didn’t seem to know how to leave us. In normal situations, you just don’t leave people standing on the side of the road in the middle of no where. That, however, is our chosen situation. So they left us, and we continued walking down the highway.