Backroads & Byways of Virginia: Drives, Day Trips & Weekend Excursions

by Bill Lohmann

With natives as your guides, this series leads you down the road less traveled. Diverse Virginia has always attracted visitors and residents alike with its mountains, beaches, and cities. In this book you’ll find 15 itineraries for inviting drives and day trips. Follow the Crooked Road, a music trail; hit all the points in the historic triangle of Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown; and wend your way along the Blue Ridge Parkway through some of the loveliest scenery the region has to offer. If you’re looking for great places to go beyond the DC suburbs and Virginia Beach, reach for this guide; there’s something here to please everyone. 50 black-and-white photographs

Genres: Travel

232 pages, Paperback

First published June 14, 2010

Reviews

[untitled lullaby · Rating 4 out of 5]

When checking the author of this book is as surprised to learn there’s a new edition out in November. This book is clearly old and whilst it gives some great advice that you can still do today (as far as I know) I would not use it as a guide now due to the feeling that a lot of these places are closed. I am a Virginia resident myself and I know country style donuts is good and the charlottesville Recommendations are decent (I didn’t like the local, replace that with the recently opened back cow steakhouse or public fish and oyster or whatever) it didn’t really go into his hometown of Richmond which is funny. Does he feel like he can’t write about where he lives and his recs or did he forget? If you are reading Bill I would put in proper pie company and VFA and Cary Street. Bill is nice in the way you can hear his personality in his travel guide, which I enjoy. He throws in a couple of jokes. He does screw up a bit of history with his writing in Appotomax (no we certainly didn’t just move on) anyway I’m sure his new edition coming in November if goodreads is right will be worth a shot for out of state visitors.

[Carol · Rating 2 out of 5]

Informative, mildly entertaining, but not very usable. It would have been so much better if they'd just included an index. With the lack of an index and vague table of contents titles - "These Old Houses", "Be Prepared to Stop", "Going Nowhere in Particular", etc. - it's extremely difficult to locate anything in the book. Maps are missing, too, with only one small general map of the state.

If you just want to read a book about Virginia, fine. If you want to find anything you read later - good luck.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is written by a journalist from Richmond and reads like a series of travel articles. It tells delightful tales of his travels along back roads and through countryside throughout the Commonwealth. It has inspired me to plan family drives and homeschool fieldtrips to explore and get to know Virginia more intimately.