Welcome to Mayberry!

After breakfast, we headed downtown to check out Mt. Airy.  Our first stop was Wally's Service Station.  This is a recreation of the station used on the Andy Griffith show.  Inside was a gift and souvenir shop but the lady running it was a veritable encyclopedia on the Andy Griffith show.  I also learned that the world's largest open pit granite quarry, visible from outer space, is in Mt. Airy.  And, there is 500 more years worth of granite there!

We then headed toward downtown, and on the way, we passed the home of Andy Griffith, which is now owned by Hampton Inn and you can stay there if you like!!

From there we went downtown where we parked and walked up and down all 4 blocks of Main Street.  It's a nice downtown with various shops, restaurants and offices.  There are, of course, many shops selling Andy Griffith and Mayberry memorabilia.  After lunch, we headed to the Hampton Inn in Dobson to check in for the car show.  We then participated in a fun run, where we were given instructions to drive through the countryside and had to find answers to questions along the way.  It was a lot of fun and we drove around the picturesque countryside of North Carolina and Virginia and included a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  I don't think we did very well, as we had several questions we could not find the answers to, but had fun anyway.  We then talked to several people in the parking lot looking at cars and from there we went to dinner at a restaurant that was recommended.  It was the Depot at Cody Creek Park, an unusual development that used to be a pasture.  It now includes an entrance through a covered bridge, a chapel, a restaurant, a gift shop, a reception hall, and the developer's home at the top of the hill with a pond with swans.  The gift shop includes a recreation of an old warehouse with an old Suburban.

It was then back to the hotel, clean the bugs off the car and get ready for the show tomorrow at SheltonVinyards.