This will be the first of several posts on our honeymoon adventures. You can see a full map of our itinerary here.

We started our honeymoon by heading south on the Blue Ridge Parkway from Roanoke. The Parkway is a winding road that goes from Virginia down to Tennessee, and passes not only through the Blue Ridge mountains, but a number of other chains as well before ending in the Smokies outside of Gatlinburg, TN. The parkway can be amazingly scenic, with frequent overlooks providing beautiful views. Or so I had been told. Our first day on the Parkway was spent in the clouds and we could barely see ten feet in front of our car as we drove.

We ended up exiting off of the Parkway early to take some roads at lower elevation. This turned out to be a good idea, because we got to drive through picturesque farm country rather than a dull haze. We spent the early afternoon in the town of Floyd, VA, a small town trying to keep up a lively arts and craft community image. We looked through a few galleries, but the town was mostly dead since it was a Sunday.

Late in the afternoon we checked in to our first lodging: Miracle Farm B&B. We had a very quaint cabin beside a small creek. We were the only guests for the night, so we had the B&B’s 25 acres of woods and farmland all to ourself. It was amazingly peaceful and quiet–a perfect spot to rest after being busy with the wedding for so long.

The next morning the inn keepers left a basket with breakfast on our door step. We enjoyed delicious omelets made with many ingredients picked from the farm, as well as freshly made juice and jam. Later in the day we took a tour of Chateau Morrisette, one of the older vineyards in Virginia. Older doesn’t mean that old though–it was started in the 70’s, but at the time most of Virginia’s vineyards had long since shut down and switched to growing tobacco. The tour guide was informative and showed us the various steps of the wine making process before leading us in a tasting of a number of their wines. Quite a few of them were very good, particularly the sweeter whites.

The next day we continued our trip south on the parkway, and were relieved to find that the clouds had taken the proper position of being far above us, rather than all around us at the overlooks. We stopped at a scenic mill and many of the overlooks. We did several short hikes, but the weather still didn’t give us great views. The walk around Cumberland Knob was particularly disappointing, but later on we got a nice view of some cascades.

More pictures are here and here