We left Stony Point around 7:15 yesterday morning with a goal of getting at least to Roanoke, VA for the day.  Before we left we needed to make a breakfast stop so we went to Rockland Bakery for some egg sandwiches, a buttered roll and a couple bottles of juice.  Good egg sandwiches are something we can’t seem to find back home and we definitely have nothing like Rockland Bakery up there.

After a good breakfast we were on our way.  Chris drove most of the first few hours so we could get away from the NY/NJ area and all of its traffic before Jackie took over just after crossing into Pennsylvania.  Jackie drove for the next couple of hours through PA, across the tiny 10 mile stretch of Maryland and to the first rest area in West Virginia. 

We were getting hungry by this point and we wanted to stop at a German restaurant in Martinsville, WV but the website said reservations were recommended and we didn’t think we were dressed for that kind of place.  So we looked to see what was coming up on roadfood (Roadfood is a book we have detailing out of the way, interesting places to eat. They also have a website) and noticed there were some interesting places just a couple of hours away.  One last stop at the first rest area in Virginia where we grabbed a bunch of brochures for next week and we also grabbed a geocache.  The nice lady behind the counter couldn’t give us a bag for our brochures because she said the building was a “green building” and she had no bags.  You would think a green building wouldn’t have 10’s of thousands of paper brochures, many of which will probably sit on the shelves for years.  The geocache was kind of neat.  It was in a birdhouse sized outhouse and when we opened it up we found this:

Chris took over from there and drove until we got to the first roadfood stop, the Southern Kitchen in New Market, VA.  We had decided we were not going to eat there because we wanted fried chicken further down the road but there was something at this place that seemed interesting: Peanut Soup.  We stopped there just for the peanut soup.  We usually try some of the regional/local favorites when we’re travelling.  Like scrapple in Pennsylvania, or crabs in Maryland, or lobster in Maine.  We ordered a cup of the peanut soup to go and ate it in the car.  It was different, but good.  Kind of tasted like a soupy peanut butter but it didn’t feel like we were eating peanut butter.  It also had pieces of onions in it. 

After a short delay we were on our way again.  We stopped for lunch around 2:30 PM, which ended up being lunch and dinner.  We stopped at Mrs. Rowe’s Family Restaurant in Staunton, VA.  There were 2 other roadfood restaurants in this town but based on what we read in the book this was the place to go.  One of Chris’s pet peeves about the Roadfood book is that many of the restaurants are clustered together in small towns.  They need to be spaced out a bit more so you don’t have to spend an entire day in a town with nothing else to do.  What drew us here was the fried chicken.  We saw on Foursquare that they had a turkey rueben so we tried that since Foursquare comments usually do not fail us. We also ordered the fried chicken, or so we thought.  When the food arrived we had the rueben but the really nice lady also brought us some kind of turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes all smothered in gravy.  There was definitely a sandwich in there because there was bread.  It looked nasty but we decided to keep it and it actually tasked really good.  We ended up ordering our fried chicken anyway, which we split.  We got it with green beans and candied yams.  Yum, candied yams, another thing you don’t really see up north.  After a satisfying meal we decided to skip the dessert even though it looked really good, and went next store to the Made in Virginia store.  Apparently they make quite a few T-shirts and post cards in Virginia.  We bought some apple syrup because we had never heard of it before.  Our last stop in Staunton was gas at Sheetz where we paid $3.69 per gallon.  Say it with me, Sheeeeeeeetz.  They have Sheetz all over the place down here, every time we take a trip down south we see them and in unison we say Sheeeeeeeetz.  We even saw a Sheetz truck on the highway later on.