A few weekends ago, Emily and I were without kids so decided to take a trip to Lewisburg, WV. Lewisburg was voted “America’s Coolest Town” in 2011 so we figured we should check it out. There is a lot of beauty across WV, but some of the best of it is collected in Greenbrier county and the counties that surround it. We had a perfect weekend for walking about town and that was exactly our plan.
There are numerous small shops in Lewisburg that very clearly cater to tourists, but are still very cool regardless. In particular, we found a place that was sort of a health-food, earthy, new-age-almost place, called Edith’s Health and Specialty Store. Normally I don’t care much about that sort of place, but we planned to check out every store in town. What I especially liked about Edith’s was the bulk food area in the basement. They had a barrel of the finest dates I have ever eaten. I know, dates aren’t a thing most people care about, let along spend time writing into a sentence, but these dates were so fresh and wonderful, I can’t wait to go back and get more! Dates…who knew?!
There were trinket stores and an outfitter and bakeries and antique stores and even a pecan store. We hit all of the shops and had a really cool time talking about, you know, adult stuff. The kids would have been crazy, but we had a great time eating dates and talking about…whatever we wanted! Lewisburg is sort of what small towns used to be I suppose. From the time before there were big box stores, when people went to the local whatever shop for…whatever. The downtown was alive with people…likely tourists, but still, people wandering around, chatting and enjoying the weather. It reminds me somewhat of my hometown before it hit against hard times.
Near Lewisburg, there are a number of other sights…we took a tour of Lost World Caverns. It was a cave homecoming for Emily as she had gone on a guided tour of the cave when she visited on an elementary school trip when she was a kid. Since we were adults, we got to do a self-guided tour which was cool. It’s nice spending extra time staring at any old dang rock we pleased as opposed to speeding through a tour guided by someone else.
I was especially surprised, as Emily is not a wine drinker, that we visited a winery/vineyard and did a wine tasting. Watts Roost Winery ferments wine onsite, but unfortunately, is closing as soon as they run out of their stock. I guess the owner prefers sheep farming to wine making so is expanding one business and closing the other. Too bad, as the wine was pretty good…we bought 10 bottles of various sorts.
Back to Lewisburg, we walked around and saw Carnegie Hall, one of four Carnegie Halls in the world. We didn’t go in, but we did walk the grounds a bit and get to say we licked Carnegie Hall…who else can say that?!
Across the road from Carnegie Hall is “The Old Stone Presbyterian Church“, an old…stone…church. What did you expect? Anyhow, it has an old cemetery attached as well. It was striking that there were a number of tombstones there that had birthdates before the US of A was the US of A. It’s hard to even think about that for me for some reason…to wonder what the area was like before the area was a state, let along a country. It must have been thrilling and terrifying and amazing and terrifying (again).
All-in-all, it was a great trip to see a cool small town. It was fun to hang with Emily and see some neat things and to sip a little wine, eat some rich food and act like adults!
