Road Trip -- Floyd, Va.

Greetings! I'm currently on day 4 of a road trip from D.C. to Minnesota via Mississippi (aka "the long way"). I have a lot to report.

The trip started in earnest on Friday, where I spent the day at my sister's neighborhood pool in Greensboro, North Carolina and head pretty much due north to a small town in Virginia called Floyd. It was a two-hour drive through winding country roads. Floyd is just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in southwestern Virginia.

My destination was the Floyd Country Store, which hosts a Friday Night Jamboree. For $3, you can hear three bands. I had heard a little bit about it, but I was not quite prepared for how awesome it was. The first band I saw was a bluegrass gospel band, which played old-timey music. The main singer had that whiny style of singing. It was pretty cool.

But then the second band had a fiddle player and from the first song everyone started dancing. On the fast songs, they did this weird dance -- it was sort of like Riverdance with people standing upright with straight backs and sort of jumping up and down stomping their feet. I don't know what it's called -- maybe a jig? And the regulars had some sort of special shoes so that when they jumped up and down it sounded like a tambourine. It was really strange, but cool. There was also square dancing.

The town is apparently some sort of center for bluegrass music, because on the streets outside the store there were a bunch of street musicians singing and playing guitar. It was a strange crowd -- probably more than half locals, a bunch of tourists, including two guys from Saudi Arabia who were dancing up a storm, and a fair number of hippies who were hard to place.

I highly recommend it. In fact, I've already begun my campaign to convince my friend J. to go back there with me when I'm back in D.C.