Monday 31st October – Halloween

We’d come up with a plan for today to head into the nearby town of Lexington (Virginia) to a cycle repair shop to get a professional to fix the gears on my bike before driving on a short distance with the hope of finding something to do for Halloween evening.  

We didn’t get off to a great start when we had a completely flat engine battery.  We couldn’t understand it – okay so we hadn’t driven further than the other end of the field (to the dump station & back) over the weekend but it wasn’t as if the RV had been left stationary for days on end!  And we’d been plugged into electricity all weekend so using everything in the coach shouldn’t have drained the battery.  Bizarre.  We approached some RV neighbours who luckily had a power pack that did the job to get the engine started and we got straight on the road, realising that we should invest in a power-pack ourselves for the next time this happened.

We found the bike repair shop and left my bicycle with a very dead-pan mechanic who we didn’t manage to get a smile out of despite our best efforts.  We had to occupy ourselves for 45 minutes before returning to see how the repair had gone so we wandered into the town.  Lexington was lovely!  There were some really individual shops and some historical-looking buildings.  We found a ‘bric-a-brac’ shop which was incredible – there was everything and anything for sale in here, some of it complete rubbish (or trash for American readers), but in there somewhere were some gems.  We got second-hand boogie-boards and tennis rackets for both of us for $15 – more outdoor pursuits in the bag!  Simon found a beautiful Fender acoustic guitar, for $150. Having left our plentiful collection of guitars at home with various friends, I wasn’t keen on Si buying another one! I had come to terms with the fact that we would have to get by without guitars on this trip but as Simon was worried about filling quiet time I realised that it would give him something else to do which he loves.  So, we tried finding some cheaper options – at pawn shops or just getting a cheaper, new guitar.  But nothing worked out any cheaper and in fact when we saw how much the guitars were selling for at the pawn shops, it made more sense for Si to invest in the quality Fender guitar with the aim of recouping some of his money at the end of this leg of our journey.  This RV is filling up fast! 

On our wander around town we spotted a poster advertising a drive-in movie…. Black Hawk Down, on 2^nd November, for free.  Now, Si loves his military history… and this film!  And I have never been to a drive-in movie before and I bet you neither has Harvey!  

Our plans for the next few days started to change.  We then spotted Lexington’s Visitor centre – we’d forgotten one of our first rules – ALWAYS go to the visitor’s centre!  The girl there was really friendly, told us about lots more interesting places to see in the area AND we noticed a poster for ghost walks around the town.  It was Halloween, what more appropriate night in the calendar is there for a ghost walk?!  The VC girl told us we just had to call and leave a message stating what time tour we wanted to be on and if we didn’t get a call saying they were full – just turn up!  Decision made…. We were going back to the same cheap campsite for three more nights, there was more to Lexington than first met the eye.

We returned to collect my bike – all gears in working order for a snip at $12, thanks mardy bike shop man!  Next stop, a return to Walmart for the last Halloween gear in the shop!  We weren’t going to show up on a Halloween ghost tour without fancy dress.  There were others desperately scrabbling over the last cheap tut left, we made our selections and purchased a devil’s face mask, a witch’s hat along with some glow sticks…. And a battery power pack after this morning’s incident.  Random shopping at its finest!  We then drove the 10-15 minutes back to the Buena Vista campsite and said ‘three more nights please?!’  The woman behind the counter looked puzzled. ‘We’ve found lots more to do’ I said.  ‘Really?’ said the woman, she was clearly not convinced.

We thought we’d go on the latest ghost tour at 830pm, which also happened to be the final one of 2016.  After dinner, we headed back down to the VC car park, late as usual, so we arrived just as the walking tour was about to depart.  We quickly grabbed our costumes and crossed the car park to pay and join in.  Only a few others, mostly children, had bothered to get into the spirit (pardon the pun) of the evening so we stood out a bit in our fancy dress!  I was somewhat disappointed… come on America, you’re supposed to be world leaders at this Halloween stuff?! Our tour leader was more eccentric thankfully, in his top hat and tails... but I think that’s what he wears every day anyway.  We did some good mileage around Lexington, home of rich Civil War history it transpires, culminating in the cemetery where we stood by the statue of Stonewall Jackson, which sometimes appears to move in the moonlight…. Ooooh, spooky.

We had a chat with the tour guide who is also an artist, Mark Cline, about another one of his projects – Foamhenge.  Yes folks, it’s a full-size replica of Wiltshire legendary landmark Stonehenge… in foam…. In Virginia.  Or at least it was, until August 2016, so sadly we won’t be able to add it to our list of huge road-side attractions!  Not sure why, but it was taken apart and is being moved to a new Virginian location in 2017.  The pictures on the internet look good though….

It was a great way to spend Halloween, and reasonably cheap at $26 for the two of us, so we were grateful we had been able to commemorate this date in the US with a special event rather than it being just another night on a campsite.