Another reason to love Lynchburg
This past Saturday we went to downtown Lynchburg to the open air market that sells Virginia-grown vegetables, flowers, and other wonderful items. This market has such a flavor of Lynchburg. The sellers are friendly, welcoming and helpful. The buyers are polite, friendly, and respectful. It’s just a great time.
In addition to the outdoor sales, the market includes an indoor area where folks display various crafts and more food. The craftsmanship is amazing and tremendously varied. There are also small retail shops in this indoor area including restaurants.
We found this market when we first moved to Lynchburg about two years ago and determined that we needed to go back often. We have not done it often enough, but decided to go on Saturday.
We purchased eggs, a huge chunk of real churned butter, flavored goat cheese, quiche, Italian sausage, some brown eggs (that still had a hen feather on one of them), and other wonderful food items—all for way below store prices. We also purchased some flowers for decorating the front of our house.
Our son chose some beautiful daffodils, which will look great in front of our house planted in two small cement urns. He has always had great taste in decorating. And my wife chose a beautiful hanging plant with purple flowers, which is now hanging from a shepherd’s hook next to our front walk.
After leaving the market, we decided to just walk around Lynchburg and enjoy the city. We walked down to the waterfront where our son watched some long freight trains go by. We walked to Amazement Square—a great hands-on children’s museum. We walked to the large air conditioning units outside Amazement Square that have been converted into a full-sized school bus for the children to play in. The children can turn the front tires with the steering wheel, turn on the blinkers, honk the horn, turn on the windshield wipers, and open and close the cool bi-fold entrance doors. My son loves it.
We walked down a street we had not walked before and found a fantastic camera shop (which I’m sure will become a regular hangout for me). We walked past the delightful mix of eclectic architecture Lynchburg’s city buildings present.
And we went to the fantastic Inklings Used Bookstore (and café). The coffee is amazingly wonderful. If this place takes off, Starbucks will be out of business. And the bookstore is delightful too. I found a copy of Berkhof’s Systematic Theology in great shapre for a great price. My wife found some wonderful treasures in books too. The owner of the store is an Episcopalian priest and is a very interesting man. I think you would have to be unusual in order to successfully run a store like this.
As always, it was a thoroughly enjoyable time out and about in our wonderful City. We love Lynchburg!
Did I mention, we love Lynchburg?
Blog Header – March 30, 2008
This week’s header photo is of my son watching the small training aircraft activity at Lynchburg Regional Airport. This one could actually be included in my Why-I-Love-Lynchburg series. In any large city, you can’t get anywhere near the airplanes. And if you look suspicious in any way, you’re likely to get a quick trip to the security center for investigation and questioning.
But the Lynchburg airport allows you to stand on the grass outside the border fence, just feet away from one of the runways. And quite a few families are there on pleasant days, having picnics and watching the planes take off and land.
My son has always loved all forms of travel. He became particularly interested in flight a little more than a year ago and he knows quite a bit about aircraft now. His interest in this caught the attention of the folks who work at the airport and they now let him go right out onto the field in front of the hangar. He is able to set on a bench, just about 25 yards from the landing strip. He can hear the chatter between the tower and the pilots as they prepare to land. He gets to talk to some of the pilots once they have landed and parked their planes. One of the men took David into the lobby of the airport and showed him a cutaway of an airplane engine, explaining to him how each part of the engine worked. David ate it all up.
We love Lynchburg!
Another reason to love Lynchburg
As another installment in my ever-growing, but unintentional series on the reasons I love Lynchburg so much, you have to see my wife’s Easter Sunday post Happy Easter. I think the photo there speaks for itself, as did my wife.
Blog Header – March 9, 2008
I guess I will, once again, comment on another one of the things that makes me love Lynchburg.
This week’s photo is of an abandoned factory building in downtown Lynchburg. A few decades ago, this was a booming and active shoe factory that employed many of the people of Lynchburg. It now sits empty, with weeds growing through the parking lot pavement, paint peeling from the walls, and windows missing many of their panes.
On one of our first explorative visits to downtown Lynchburg, my wife and I passed this building. We were both struck immediately with its forlorn beauty. I turned the car around and we spent the next hour or so walking around this building taking pictures from various angles.
Many of you probably do not understand our fascination with an abandoned factory building. By way of explanation—we were both raised in the suburbs of Washinton, D.C. Nothing is ever left abandoned in Washington. When a building is vacated it is either leased to new tenants as soon as the previous ones vacate or it is destroyed and a new building is built in the same spot.
It’s fun for Northern people to watch folks experience their first snow storm. It is much the same for my wife and me when it comes to seeing an abandoned building. We have not seen abandoned buildings very often, except in photos. And I doubt that either of us have ever seen a building that has been abandoned for an entire generation. It’s much the same as visiting ancient Greece to see the ruins—just not quite as old.
Another reason to love Lynchburg
I didn’t really intend to run a complete series of blog posts on why I love Lynchburg so much, but things keep popping up. And today brought another reason to love Lynchburg into view.
My wife took our family to Little Dickens—a delightful bookstore that sells new and used books as well as educational toys, teaching supplies, and other things. As if this all was not good enough, there’s a very good coffee shop called The Drowsy Poet in the back of the bookstore. They have very good coffee, a good selection of sandwiches, wraps, and other foods. And to top it all off, they have free internet access.
by James Montgomery Boice
My father has always loved used bookstores because he manages to find real treasures in them—treasures that apparently no one else has noticed yet. Today Kim discovered a James Montgomery Boice commentary on Matthew 5-7. The Sermon on the Mount is one in a series of expositional commentaries. The series includes expositional commentaries of the Minor Prophets, the Psalms, the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of John, Acts, Romans, and Ephesians. Until his recent death, Dr. Boice was the pastor of the historic Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Every book I’ve ever read by Dr. Boice has been outstanding. I’m really looking forward to reading this book.
After returning from the bookstore, David wanted to go down to the parking lot near our house where he saw a parked backhoe. Thus the photo at the top of this post.
The Little Dickens Bookstore has hard cover books for less than $3.00 and has an amazing collection. If you’re in Lynchburg, check them out.
Another reason to love Lynchburg
Last Saturday my son and I went to the local elementary school’s playground. It’s an amazing large all wooden playground with lots of fun stuff in it. Many of the kids from the various surrounding neighborhoods gather there to have fun and to look for other kids to play with. Quite often there are pick up games of baseball, football, or basketball. There are also benches for us old folks to sit on and read or watch our kids have fun.
But the thing that I love so much when we visit this playground is not the great equipment—it is the fact that in Lynchburg the kids are polite to the adults and play well together. Even kids of significantly different ages play well together. It’s wonderful to watch and brings a warmth to my heart that is hard to explain.
Last Saturday we met two teenage girls and a young girl who had just turned three. The four of them played together and had great fun together for about two hours. Just before we all left to head back to our homes, the three-year-old got a splinter in her hand. You can see one of the teenage girls and my son looking at the young girl’s hand and comforting her. She was very brave.
The pictures in this post are all from this past Saturday there at the playground. There are many levels at which my family fell in love with Lynchburg. This is just one layer of what makes Lynchburg wonderful.
You just have to visit. But use a U-Haul—you’re not going to want to go back to wherever you were from to begin with.
I love Lynchburg
The weather forecast was calling for snow. I asked my boss to let me work from home in case the weather got crazy and he graciously allowed me to do so. So early this morning we kept an eye on the window to see how things were progressing.
At about 5:50am we received a call from the public school system saying that school had been cancelled due to the incoming weather situation. At about 6:00 the snow began to fall. And it fell. And it fell. And it fell some more. We ended up with a good bit of accumulation. Our son had a blast.
Lynchburg, a beautiful town anytime, became a delightful winter wonderland today. I had to go outside and take these pictures. The first couple of pictures were before the sun came up at around 6:30 am. The others were at around lunchtime when I went outside to watch my son go sledding down the hill in front of our house.
Thank you, Lord, for making such a beautiful temporary home for us.
I love Lynchburg
The weather forecast was calling for snow. I asked my boss to let me work from home in case the weather got crazy and he graciously allowed me to do so. So early this morning we kept an eye on the window to see how things were progressing.
At about 5:50am we received a call from the public school system saying that school had been cancelled due to the incoming weather situation. At about 6:00 the snow began to fall. And it fell. And it fell. And it fell some more. We ended up with a good bit of accumulation. Our son had a blast.
Lynchburg, a beautiful town anytime, became a delightful winter wonderland today. I had to go outside and take these pictures. The first couple of pictures were before the sun came up at around 6:30 am. The others were at around lunchtime when I went outside to watch my son go sledding down the hill in front of our house.
Thank you, Lord, for making such a beautiful temporary home for us.
Another reason to love Lynchburg
Those who know me personally probably get tired of hearing me brag about the town I live in—Lynchburg, Virginia. It’s an amazingly wonderful place full of delightful people. I’d like to brag on another outstanding feature of Lynchburg in this blog post: Daddy Bim’s Barbecue!
434-847-5003
1905 Old Forest Rd,
Lynchburg, VA 24501
This place is amazing. As you can see from the photo above, it’s basically a little hole in the wall out on a country road. But it always has quite a few cars in the parking lot and the people leaving always look like they’ve had a good time. But the excitement begins inside when you order some pulled pork barbecue or barbecued ribs. Their food is some of the best barbecue I’ve ever had.
And the people who work there are delightful. It’s a wonderful hometown restaurant, the likes of which you just don’t find in more urban areas.
Another reason to love Lynchburg
Those who know me personally probably get tired of hearing me brag about the town I live in—Lynchburg, Virginia. It’s an amazingly wonderful place full of delightful people. I’d like to brag on another outstanding feature of Lynchburg in this blog post: Daddy Bim’s Barbecue!
434-847-5003
1905 Old Forest Rd,
Lynchburg, VA 24501
This place is amazing. As you can see from the photo above, it’s basically a little hole in the wall out on a country road. But it always has quite a few cars in the parking lot and the people leaving always look like they’ve had a good time. But the excitement begins inside when you order some pulled pork barbecue or barbecued ribs. Their food is some of the best barbecue I’ve ever had.
And the people who work there are delightful. It’s a wonderful hometown restaurant, the likes of which you just don’t find in more urban areas.
Lynchburg Christmas
Last week I posted a few pictures of Washington, D.C., with the Christmas decorations brightening the early morning streets [Read that post.] Today my son and I were walking the streets of our hometown, Lynchburg, Va. I thought it would be nice to post a photo of this altogether different city with one of its Christmas decorations. My family really loves Lynchburg. It is a beautiful city with true depth of character. And the city is made more beautiful by the delightful people who live there. I’d invite you to visit, but I know that you would do the same thing we did once we visited—you’d pack up your family and move there. And eventually it would be just like Washington, D.C.—overcrowded.
But seriously, if you get the chance to visit Lynchburg, do so. You’ll thoroughly enjoy it.
Lynchburg Christmas
Last week I posted a few pictures of Washington, D.C., with the Christmas decorations brightening the early morning streets [Read that post.] Today my son and I were walking the streets of our hometown, Lynchburg, Va. I thought it would be nice to post a photo of this altogether different city with one of its Christmas decorations. My family really loves Lynchburg. It is a beautiful city with true depth of character. And the city is made more beautiful by the delightful people who live there. I’d invite you to visit, but I know that you would do the same thing we did once we visited—you’d pack up your family and move there. And eventually it would be just like Washington, D.C.—overcrowded.
But seriously, if you get the chance to visit Lynchburg, do so. You’ll thoroughly enjoy it.
By His grace - For His glory 