Rain soaked the area Tuesday and intensified overnight with Wednesday dawning with severe weather and flood alerts. The deluge will probably leave Grand Canyon size gullies in our driveway but I don't care. We need the water in what has been a second year of dry conditions.

Forecasts claim the upcoming Labor Day Weekend will be mostly sunny and pleasant but, with the dryness around here, I'd trade a long weekend of rain for beautiful weather.

Had some time to kill between appointments in Roanoke Monday, so I visited the Virginia Museum of Transportation down by the rail tracks.

My mother and I arrived in Roanoke in 1952 aboard a Norfolk and Western trail pulled by one of the legendary 611 streamlined locomotives (right) after a long train ride and several connections from Tampa, Florida. I remember that steam locomotive well, a belching monsters that both terrified and excited a five-year-old.

Also on display is the huge 1218 locomotive (above), a favorite of railroad photographer O. Winston Link. A visit to the Link museum in the old N&W passenger station is also worth the time.

A gallery dedicated to cars and road travel (below) wasn't open on my last visit a few years ago but I got a chance to tour it this time around.  In it, you will find vintage cars, billboards even a series of Burma Shave signs.

The Transportation Museum has struggled financially and depends on donations and community support to stay afloat. If you're in Roanoke, take time to visit. It's worth the effort.

Rode the Blue Ridge Parkway Sunday and found heavy traffic as falling gas prices appeared to put both cars and larger vehicles back on the twisting mountain road that winds through Virginia and North Carolina.

Maybe this bodes well for the upcoming Labor Day weekend where events like the annual Carroll County Gun Show and Flea Market depend heavily on carloads of visitors.  The visitors packed the streets of Floyd Friday night.

We can hope.

School started in Floyd County Thursday and the sports season kicked off Thursday night with volleyball at FCHS.  The first home football game is Friday, August 28. Get out your Buffalo hats, shirts and banners and suport your local school athletics.

Grandin Road was my first neighborhood when I moved to Roanoke in 1965. Had a one-bedroom furnished flat at Grandin Road Apartments, attended the University of Virginia's Roanoke Campus just up the street during the day and worked nights at The Roanoke Times, starting as a copy boy and moving up to reporter the following year.

Garland's drug store anchored one side of the street and the Grandin Theater the other. A large hardware store served residents along with a cleaners and a TV/appliance store. We bought groceries at Mick or Mack and got our cars washed at the Grandin Car Wash.

I hadn't been back on Grandin since returning to the area in 2004 so I parked along the street on Wednesday night and took a walk. The Mick or Mack and Grandin Theater remain today but the street is now dominated by restaurants, coffee stops, a whole food store and some trendy boutiques.  Took in Gonzo, the documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, at the Grandin. The theater is now subdivided into several screens but is still cozy The popcorn was better in the 60s.

UVa's Roanoke campus closed in 1966 and many of the faculty moved over to the new Virginia Western Community College on Colonial Avenue. I moved to The Jefferson Apartments next to Elmwood Park near downtown. The Victorian apartment building was torn down a few years after I left The Roanoke Times and moved on to a newspaper in Illinois. A sign for Carrillion Hospital now sits on the site.

Jefferson Street never felt like a real neighboord.  Grandin Road did. It was nice to visit the old neghborhood.

Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, the legendary Democratic political consultant who lives on Bent Mountain, brought a columnist and photographer from Denver's Rocky Mountain News to Floyd recently to write about our "culture" and how it might play out in the upcoming Presidential election.

What we got was stereotyped trash that failed to capture Floyd's culture, our heritage or the Friday Night Jamboree.

An example of columnist Mike Littwin's brand of "journalism":

We're taking "The Crooked Road" music trail - an aptly named back road that, I'm told, will lead us directly to music heaven, which is apparently located on a stage in the back of the Floyd Country Store. Every Friday night, when they hold their gospel and bluegrass and old-timey-music jamboree, this town of 432 turns into a festival of banjo-pickin' and flat-footin' - a mini-bluegrass Woodstock, except with no nudity in evidence but, as compensation, some mighty nice-looking store-bought coveralls.

The pickers and the flat-footers and the whoopers and the hollerers spill out from the store and onto the streets and over to the ice cream store (it's a dry county) and onto the benches and wherever else they can grab a seat or, even better, grab a partner - no age requirement, but it seems to help if you're on the, uh, north side of 60.

The pickers who drive out of the mountains to jam here in the streets set the beat, and while I'm not sure exactly where they invented toe-tapping and knee-slapping, it couldn't have been far from here.

If that's not culture, well, gah-dayem, what is?

Frankly, I expected more from Mudcat, the man who built much of his political consultant reputation on Mark Warner's ride to the governor's mansion. Apparently he and Littwin worked together at a newspaper once and that's why he brought the Denver reporter here.

Memo to Mike Littwin: The "ice cream store" is in the Floyd County Store, not across the street. Floyd County is far from "dry." We have nationally-acclaimed wineries here. They serve beer and wine at most restaurants and you can even get a mixed drink down at Ray's on U.S. 221.  The Crooked Road runs for a spell along U.S. 221, a well-maintained federal highway that is not much of a "back road." On any Friday night, you can find as many kids and teenagers in the Jamboree as older folks.

Sorry you missed all that Mike. But since you're into stereotypes, let me ask this: Were you, perhaps, on a Rocky Mountain high when you came to Floyd?

Fred First, the dean of Floyd County bloggers and the high priest of public angst, is fretting over a classic dilemma -- doing what you love versus doing what pays the bills.

Writes Fred on Fragments from Floyd:

Here too, like many of my retired and nearly-retired age cohorts and friends, I wrestle with the devil of wasting time for little if any income against the angel of enjoying what I do with my time; I’m trying to come to a sustainable peace between the pleasure of the work and the pain of putting small and occasional numbers on a spreadsheet. Accountants are famous for crushing fragile Muses, you know.

Fred's quandary is shared by many in Floyd County, an area awash in artists who do what they love but must slave away at things they don't particularly love to cover the cost of living.  But the problem is not limited to our corner of the world. Amy is a retired actress and most of her friends still in the business wait tables or drive cabs to cover the cost of pursuing their acting career. Most musicians have day jobs to make ends meet.

When I hear and see friends fret over finances, I count myself lucky that I have -- for most of my life -- been lucky enough to do what I love and make a little money doing it. My one foray away from journalism -- into the bowels of the American political system -- brought in a lot more income but no job satisfaction. I took a severe pay cut to return to journalism and never looked back.

But others have not been so lucky and this summer, with high gas prices cutting into the number of tourists who visit Floyd and a lagging economy keeping people from spending money for discretionary purchases.  More than one business owner in Floyd has confieded that this is a do or die year and they may not be around is business falls short over the Labor Day weekend.  Some have strong enough resources and sound plans to get them over the current slump but others do not.

Hopefully, we can all weather this current challenge to Floyd's growing potential as an entertainment and artistic venue.