However, if you are going a bit further south, In Bedford, VA there is the National D-Day Museum, and my wife and I have been there a few times. (Perhaps best known for the impact DDay had on the town, where nineteen soldiers from that town with a population of about 3000 were killed in one day.)
Still in Bedford, but up on the Blue Ridge Parkway, there is a horse ranch, Reba Farm Inn and I have been there several times...loved it. Not your run of the mill ranch where you can go to ride horses.
Heh, if horse riding isn't interesting to you, don't bother reading the rest...:) Just me telling about it.
I am not an overly experienced horse rider, but I can ride, and it doesn't intimidate me. Unfortunately, until I went to Reba Farm for the first time, most of the riding I have done in my life has been the "follow the horse in front of you" variety, not all that exciting. But it was different there.
The guy who runs it with his wife is a real-life "horse whisperer". I am not kidding. Their specialty it taking in troubled horses and horses with behavioral problems.
He rescues them.
When he gets them, the first thing he does is remove their horse shoes. When you go out to the giant quonset hut where the horses are prepared to go on rides, there is a pile of rusting horseshoes about four feet high. None of his horses have any shoes.
He doesn't segregate his horses into groups, he just lets them all live together, stallions, mares, and geldings in a huge herd. He says it is how they live in nature, so he lets them. (He did have his prize stallion segregated in a small paddock one day as I reference below, but that was really the only time I saw it in several visits)
As he was explaining this to me, his prize stallion was in the field with all the horses, and was acting up, trying to engage a huge work horse stallion who completely ignored the high-strung stallion. It was comical, and Ron grinned as he pointed this out to me and said "Look at that big lug of a horse...the other one is trying to pick a fight with him, but he couldn't care less!"
He talks to all of his horses in plain English, and I swear, they understand him. (All these names below are made up since I can't remember them) I was watching them take out a bunch of horses one day for a group ride. He went to the pasture holding all the horses, opened the gate and yelled "Betsy! Come on." and a horse peeled off, ran over about fifty yards and right through the partially opened gate, and without any guidance, ran up the hill into the quonset hut and right up to a bucket of oats to eat and wait for a saddle.
He called "Jim! Come on." and another horse ran over and up the hill into the "stable" to get set up for a ride.
He called out "Strawberry! Come on!" and two horses ran over and both went through the gate. He yelled after one of them "Daisy! Come back...you aren't going out!" and without hesitation, the horse stopped, turned around and walked back through the still open gate unprompted!
I thought this was amazing-I know some horses are smart, but this guy seemed to have a way with them. When we went inside to saddle the horses, they were all standing where he had placed the buckets of oats and he just walked to each one and clipped their harness to an eye-bolt on the wall.
As we were saddling the horses, I heard this ruckus coming from outside somewhere, a horse whinnying loudly and making various horse noises. I was puzzled by this, and didn't know what was going on, but Ron didn't even seem to notice it. I said to Ron something like "It sounds like that horse is in trouble or something" and he stopped, went outside and I could see a small one horse paddock about 100 yards away with his prize stallion in it, and the horse was going mental, rearing up, just making a scene. Ron yelled "COWBOY! YOU AREN'T GOING OUT FOR A RIDE TODAY!" and the horse huffed and stamped its front hooves into the ground...hilariously, like a little kid being told he couldn't play with a toy!
Ron just said "He sees us getting set, and he wants to go with me on the ride."
I loved it. I had never seen horses in this light before, and I looked at them in a completely different way!
>>>>There are three places I recommend to everyone in Virginia:<<<<
A couple of additional recommendations for Virginia visitors: The MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, and the Pungo Air Museum in Virginia Beach. You could spend a couple days at PAM and still not take it all, in.