I have spent the last three days in the Asheville NC

[Withywindle]

67. You have come to the right person!

My dad is a retired park ranger who worked on the Blue Ridge Parkway from the 70s through the 90s

The Crooked Road Music Trail has a travel guide and companion book that's very good: https://www.virginia.org/places-to-visit/the-crooked-road/

I'm assuming you already know about the Blue Ridge Music Center (which is relatively new).

They have daily midday music sessions: https://www.blueridgemusiccenter.org/

It's an outdoor venue so it's safer than a big indoor concert. (Sadly, this is a mostly red area with low vaccination and masking, so...)

You can't miss Barr's Fiddle Shop in Galax. Living history and you'll find someone to talk your ear off and sell you all the local CD's you can stand: https://barrsfiddleshop.com/

The Floyd Country Store in Floyd County also has tons of live music: https://www.floydcountrystore.com/


Check out the Carroll County History museum and their exhibit about the Courthouse Tragedy, a pretty spectacular shooting that happened there in 1912 (and people are STILL talking about it). The resulting manhunt was front-page news nationwide until the Titanic sank. The Sidna Allen House is closed for renovations, but you can drive by it on Route 52 in Fancy Gap, it's impressive: http://carrollvamuseum.org/museum/courthouse-tragedy/


Groundhog Mountain has light hiking and AMAZING views (even more so if you climb the tower)

If you can go a little distance, Whitetop Mountain and Mt Rogers (both in Grayson County) are, I believe, VA's highest peaks and have absolutely gorgeous confer/moss forests near the peaks. https://www.blueridgeparkway.org/communities/fancy-gap-hillsville-galax-carroll-counties/

The Orlean Puckett cabin is beautiful, and has a haunting story about a midwife who delivered 1,000 babies in her life - and had 24 of her own, and 23 of them died. (A recent book speculates that she and her husband had a rare genetic incompatibility: https://www.nps.gov/people/orlean-puckett.htm

Watch out on Labor Day weekend. The Official VFW Flea Market and Gun Show has been cancelled at its main location, but there are lots of people holding popup/alternative sales on their own land. When it's running normally, this thing is so huge that it turns Hillsville into the biggest city in VA for three days. The traffic and parking situation is just as you'd expect when half a million people come to a town that usually only has just less than 3,000.