So since the U2 concert was on Thursday we decided to make a long weekend out of this trip to Charlottesville. We stayed the whole time in this cute bed and breakfast nestled in the mountains a quick drive off of I-64 and the Blue Ridge Parkway called the Iris Inn. We get full breakfast every morning and have a nice room with a bunch of windows that let in lots of light and a pretty view of the woods in the morning.
The Friday after the concert we decided to head up into the mountains for a hike after breakfast.
We chatted with some of the other couples at breakfast about where to go and decided to head to Crabtree Falls after a bit of internet searching. The Falls were about an hour away from where we were so we Googled for directions and wanted to stay off the interstates so we took the second recommended route which took us on five miles of dirt road along a mountainside that looked like the map screenshot on the right here, quite an interesting drive.
We arrived at the trailhead around 11:30am and had a great hike up to the top of the mountain. The trail was a series of switchbacks and each time you would finish one you would get a new view of the falls, 5 or 6 times you go back and forth and after about 3 hours we reached the top (with probably an hour of that just taking pictures, which will be up on Flickr soon). We snacked on granola bars at the top and then made it back down in under 45 minutes.
Once we got back to the Inn and got cleaned up we headed into downtown Charlottesville to the Belmont district to go to this great restaurant we’d found last time we were here called Mas Tapas. The food there is amazing and a lot of it is locally sourced. The place opened at 5:30 and after our hike we were starving so we were there just after they opened and managed to get one of the last open tables before the waiting list started (by the time we left there were at least a dozen people outside waiting for tables, it’s really that good). We managed to snag our order sheet back from our server so here is are the six dishes we had with our bottle of Castell del Remei Gotim Bru 2006 (very tasty and a very good price):
- Pan al horno (our cold-fermented, hand-crafted bread, baked with natural starters in our wood-fired brick oven daily)
- Datil con tocino (dates wrapped in applewood smoked bacon, roasted till crispy)
- Queso con alcachofas (roasted artichoke hearts, garlic, sweet onion, olive oil and goat cheese spread with bread)
- Salchicha a la parilla (the eponymous Spanish country sausage – air-cured, dry-aged with smoked pimenton, olive oil and pork)
- Lomo en capa (Angus beef tenderloin with espresso-smoked pimenton crust, pan-seared rare only with pico de gallo)
- Mejillones con sofrito (Farm-raised Pacific Penn Cove mussels cooked in a smoky sofrito sauce with our brick oven bread)
And it was all amazing tasting. And we had a warm strawberry-rhubarb pastry thing for dessert, and if you know me and my obsession with (especially Trader Joe’s) strawberry-rhubarb pie that was definitely a treat. The restaurant has been voted best in Charlottesville this year for best appetizer (the bacon-wrapped dates), best service, best “small plates” and best service, and it definitely deserves all of those accolades.
Today we met up with my parents and did a bit of winery touring around the Madison area where Jeremy went to high school. We met my parents at Prince Michel winery right off of Route 29 and enjoyed a rather extensive tasting there, 3 pages of wines! And the great part was they only charge you $1 and that’s only if you do the “reserve” page of wines. We ended up buying 3 bottles of their Cab Sav and then we headed to the famous Pig ‘n Steak for a late lunch (and to get some food in our bellies to absorb all that wine 😉 ).
After starting off with a sampler appetizer platter of fried pickles, fried olives and fried broccoli (with cheese inside of course) we enjoyed bbq and burgers and mountains of fries before heading out to the final destination of the afternoon, Sweely Estate Winery. The tasting room was beautiful and the whole building was newly built with a huge reception hall on one side all in stone and big timbers, a nice mix of modern aesthetic with traditional materials. We were so stuffed from lunch we sat out on the back patio for a half hour or so letting our food settle before heading in for the $4 tasting of 9 wines. The wines there were pretty good, we all preferred the whites over the reds I think, but that may have been due more to the fact we were so full of food and wine that by the time we got to the reds there was just no more room in our stomachs. We parted ways with my parents after finishing the tasting and took a nice scenic route (not as scenic as good ol’ 814, all paved) back to the Inn. We stopped at the grocery store in Waynesboro on the way back and grabbed some cheese and crackers as a snack but we never ended up having any. We sat up on the “observation deck”, a little 3rd floor balcony off on one side of the Inn and watched the sun set over the mountains and then walked down to a lower deck with a swing and sat and read our books for a while in the cool evening before heading in for the night. A very nice, quiet and peaceful way to end a most excellent weekend before heading back to the ‘burg.
