Walking And Eating Around Roanoke

7/15/2015

...Continued From Yesterday:
Matt and Suzie's wedding celebration was to begin at 5pm Saturday, which gave us most of the day to see the sights around Roanoke.

Though there was a nice-looking breakfast bar available in the hotel lobby cafe,

Tom, Tommy, Claire, Miguel and I decided to head back downtown to a cute-looking breakfast place we’d passed the evening before with a promising-sounding name, Scrambled By Choice.

Evidently everyone in Roanoke had the same idea as us. The place was jammed and we were told there was a15-minute wait.

As we were already there we opted to wait.

In retrospect, we concluded that we’d probably have fared better seeking nourishment elsewhere.
After our wait the five of us were jammed against a wall into a table for four.

We waited forever for our food, except for Miguel who waited forever-and-a-half, as his breakfast didn’t arrive until the rest of us had finished ours.
And for all that, the food was nothing to write home about.
The home fries were definitely from the freezer,

...and the consensus was that the scrambled eggs could have been from a powdered mix.

The French toast was good, though.

And the server did bring us an extra order of French toast as an apology. Or maybe it was by mistake. It was probably by mistake. Anyway, none of us could see what the draw of this slow, crowded, mediocre-food breakfast place was. Oh well, maybe it’s a Roanoke tradition.
After breakfast Tom and I parted ways with Tommy, Claire, and Miguel, who decided to walk around Mill Mountain, which is the mountain that creates the beautiful view seen from our hotel (see yesterday’s post).

Tom and I headed back downtown because I was curious about the provenance of a palatial Tudor-style building high on a hill that dominates part of the downtown skyline.

Turns out this building is the Roanoke Hotel and Conference Center.

After doing a once-around the building we decided to head up Mill Mountain,

...where we ran into Tommy, Claire, and Miguel at the overlook

Then we headed down the mountain,

..back to downtown Roanoke,

....where Miguel and Claire sought out some ice cream,

...then met up with the rest of us at the Shiska Mediterranean Grill,

...which establishment I'd glanced into the night before and spotted folks noshing on the most magnificent-looking slices of pizza I'd ever seen, and so I now had my mind set upon procuring one of those splendid slices for myself and my loved ones.
And so procure we did.

Check out the gargantuosity of that slice! $4 for the pepperoni,

...and $3 for the cheese. Tommy had wanted to order two slices, but the server told him, no, you only want one. He was right, of course.

The pizza was New York-style-foldable and it was delicious, as was the side of chicken hummus we shared:

After our snack of pizza and hummus Tommy, Miguel and Claire headed back to the hotel while Tom and I walked around the City Market section of downtown.