2 More Weeks In Roanoke – Here’s What We Did

After spending a couple of weeks in Hampton, VA, Shae and I moved on to Roanoke for a couple of weeks. We’ve visited Roanoke several times over the last few years, so you can check out all our previous posts here.

The main reason we headed back there was because Shae and her mom wanted to get more tattoos together and there’s a tattoo artist there they like to use. I certainly had no objections heading back to Roanoke as it’s one of my favorite cities to visit.

We spent some time there working, but also got to experience some new things in and around Roanoke. Here’s everything we got up to during our two weeks there.

Tattoos

Shae loves animal encounters, so to commemorate all the animals she’s gotten to meet and/or pet, she gets tattoos of their paw/footprints. She’d gotten the first batch at Star City Tattoo, so that’s another reason she wanted to return to the same tattoo artist.

Her latest batch includes manatees, baby gators, otters and llamas due to all those animal experiences in the past year.

We’d done that manatee swim for Shae’s mom’s birthday, so she got a manatee tattoo dressed in her style – colored hair and everything!

Mill Mountain Star

While I worked one afternoon, Shae took Truffles for a drive up to the Mill Mountain Star for a walk around. It ended up being foggy that day and so there wasn’t much that could be seen, so here’s a cute photo of Truffles.

Hiking

The three of us returned to the Mill Mountain Star a few days later, except this time we hiked up there rather than drove.

That was a good warmup for a much more strenuous hike a few days later up to McAfee Knob. Shae had to work that day, so it was just me and Truffles.

It’s an 8 mile round trip hike and unfortunately my hiking boots decided to wait until a couple of miles along before almost losing the sole on one boot.

I thankfully managed to fix it in place so it didn’t cause a problem the rest of the way. I’m glad that was the case because the view from the top is so beautiful, hence why McAfee Knob is my happy place.

Despite only being 10 lbs, Truffles is a little trooper and hiked the entire 8 miles on her little legs.

Ice Cream

After hiking up to the Mill Mountain Star, we stopped by Blue Cow Ice Cream to treat ourselves. It was so good, we went back another couple of times while in Roanoke and we’ll no doubt head back there the next time we visit Star City.

Beer

Something else we treated ourselves to after our Mill Mountain hike (well, I treated myself to seeing as Shae doesn’t like beer) is a stout from Starr Hill Pilot Brewery.

Hotel

We managed to get a good rate at the Residence Inn Roanoke Airport, so we stayed there all two weeks.

Here’s my full review of the hotel, but a brief summary is that it’s a perfectly nice hotel, but we probably wouldn’t stay there again simply because their Wi-Fi was awful. Both of us work online, with Shae teaching online classes, so she in particular needs a good internet connection. Instead, we had to resort to using our phones as hotspots at times. A fortnight of awful internet is a miserable experience when working online, so we’d likely go back to the Hyatt Place Roanoke next time.

Food

Seeing as our hotel suite had a kitchen, we didn’t eat out much. One place we did get takeout from was Inka Grill Peruvian Cuisine. We’ve had Peruvian chicken before and thought it was delicious, so I had high hopes for the Peruvian chicken I ordered. It was OK, but not at all memorable – I’ve had more flavorful rotisserie chickens from grocery stores.

Shae ordered their ceviche and loved it, so that definitely seems to be the way to go if you like seafood.

Museums

Before setting off on our road trip we visited the Roanoke Pinball Museum and had a great time. We returned during this recent visit and enjoyed it again despite it being a little different right now due to COVID. I updated our post about the museum so you can see what it was like both pre and during COVID.

While I was working one day, Shae visited the Virginia Museum of Transportation with her mom. Shae teaches online through Outschool; one of her classes offers virtual field trips of places we visit, so she went there to collect information for her class. It’s apparently a really interesting museum, so check out this post for more about that.

That’s everything we got up to during our latest visit to Roanoke – I can’t wait to return again in the future to discover even more fun things to do in the city.