My Rain-Drenched Trip To Virginia -- Part One -- Mount Airy, North Carolina

Yours truly posing between the bars depicting the
Mayberry Courthouse/Jail from The Andy Griffith Show.

Greetings and Salutations my friends and fellow travelers!

On April 24th and 25th, my travels took me north up I-77 into North Carolina and Virginia. 

My final destination: beautiful Luray Caverns. 

I started my trip early in the morning of the 24th in the middle of a small spring shower. It would turn out that it would rain off and on, as well as maintain constant cloud cover the whole trip there and back. Fortunately most of the best parts of my trip would either be indoors, or underground, so the rain was little concern.

Along the way I also planned to make several stops to photograph several major sites of interest. The first of which was a stopover in the small town of Mount Airy, North Carolina -- the birthplace of actor Andy Griffith, and home of the Andy Griffith Museum. 

Mount Airy is noted for being the inspiration for the setting of the fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina in the popular television series: The Andy Griffith Show. The show itself was largely filmed in Hollywood at the Desilu Studios (now Culver Studios) in California. 

The town is extremely proud of the connection to its most famous son and the show he helped produce, as you can see in the following photos of both the town and the famous Andy Griffith Museum itself. Founded in 2009 the museum attracts around 200 visitors daily and contains the largest collection of memorabilia from The Andy Griffith Show TV series.

An outstanding Little Free Library on the corner
of Main Street in downtown Airy.

The Andy Griffith Playhouse and TV Land monument.

Statue of Andy and Opie from The Andy Griffith Show
outside the Andy Griffith Museum in Mount Airy, NC.

A replica of Barney's Sidecar outside of the Andy Griffith Museum.

The Matlock suit worn by Andy Griffith in his
role as defense attorney Ben Matlock on the
mystery/drama series of the same name.

One of the uniform shirts and sheriff badge worn
by Andy Griffith in his role as Andy Taylor on
The Andy Griffith Show.

Barney Fife's Salt-n-Pepper suit from the show.
Actor Don Knotts wore this same suit in several
films, including The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.

Otis Campbell's suit jacket and hats.
Otis was played by actor Hal Smith.

The actual jailhouse keys from
The Andy Griffith Show.

Replica of Andy's desk from the Mayberry Jail/Courthouse.

"Now here at The Rock we have rules..."

After leaving lovely Mount Airy behind, I returned to I-77 and soon crossed over the Virginia State Line.

Well I hope you enjoyed these photos. Be sure to let me know what you think in the comments section below. The next part of my two-day site-seeing tour will be coming up on my next blog post. Don't go too far now, ya hear?