The drive from Winchester VA to Roanoke VA is not a long one. So, we left a little after 10:00 a.m. and headed toward the Valley Turnpike Museum in Harrisonburg VA.

Virginia Highway 11, before Interstate 81 existed, was the main north/south route to take in Virginia. According to the museum, “Local lore remembers the 19th century Valley Turnpike romantically: many depictions have simply been of a wide and well-built road for its day, dotted with toll gates and wayside taverns. Horses, wagons, and buggies of bygone days trod its macadam surface.” However, another name for the road is “The Slave Trail of Tears.”

The road was a thousand-mile river of people heading from Virginia to Louisiana. Reportedly, a million enslaved people came from the upper North to the deep South. The mass-displacement of people was far larger than Andrew Jackson’s removal in the 1830’s of Native Americans from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi (the march was known as the “Trail of Tears.” Wow!)

The Mysterious Lone-Henge is the work of prankster Mark Cline and opened on April 1, 2021. It's a solitary Stonehenge monolith in a farm pasture. According to Mark, the artwork is a 20th anniversary commemoration of his first April Fool's Day prank in 2001. There is a lizard-man climbing the lone stone. Mark is the same person who opened Dinosaur Kingdom II. What a character!

Next, we purchased tickets to visit the Roanoke Pinball Museum. What a hoot! The best part about the place is that one is allowed to play (for free) on almost all the machines! Needless to say, we discovered that neither of us is a pinball wizard.

Heading to our hotel we saw a large arm sticking out of the ground and it held a shiny ball. The sculpture is named Global Harmony and was made to commemorate Roanoke’s public art and to honor the city’s racial diversity.