Staunton: The Coolest Town You've Never Heard Of

One day in October, I stepped outside to find that the leaves had started to turn crimson. Before we knew it, fall had come. And so, a last-minute plan was hatched, for some hiking in Shenandoah National Park.

Three days’ lead time for a weekend-long escape doesn’t leave you with many options. Then again, we were going to Virginia… not exactly an exotic tourist mecca. So after approximately four minutes of googling “cool small towns in VA” we decided to base ourselves in a little place neither one of us had ever heard, of called Staunton.

Staunton is a two and a half hour drive South of D.C., set alongside the Southwest portion of Shenandoah National Park. It’s small – 24,000 people by the last census.

For those who don’t know, it’s actually pronounced “Stanton”; only tourists pronounce the drawling “Stawn”, we were told in no uncertain terms by a heavily made up sixty-something southern belle at a winery on the way into town.

But I digress. Staunton… is awesome. Not in that “aw this town is so quaint I wonder if there are Amish people here” way, but actually, seriously cool.

In New York you’ll sometimes walk into someone’s teeny tiny apartment, and be amazed by how it is so well laid out and tastefully appointed that you’d never guess it’s 400 square feet? So Staunton is the small town equivalent.

It doesn’t have a ton of options, but all of the options are pretty perfect. Some standouts:

A wine and cheese bar, called the Yelping Dog (nothing to do with Yelp, but instead a second naming attempt after the copyright infringing first attempt, "Barking Dog"). Generous cheese plates, fantastic gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, and, of course, tasty reds.

Zynodoa, where we ate better than we had in the previous eight months in D.C. Think sophisticated Southern food, served farm to table (and not in that pretentions, we're going to remind you at every turn that our cows are fed clouds and butterflies and massaged three times daily, way). Zynodoa was apparently started by a Miami restauranteur whose flight to New York was diverted on 9/11 and grounded in Staunton. He so fell in love with the town that he decided to make it the base for his next venture.

The Pompei Lounge, a confusing bar that had apparently been converted from an old townhouse in which a granny must have lived. Because it was still decorated with granny furniture. We're talking about a serious collection of armchairs and armoirs. But also a bar on each level, and a roofdeck where we overheard a distressed woman utter the following priceless quote: "I thought he was a knight in shining armor, but he was just a douchebag in tin foil."

Also, the bars close at 2 a.m. here. DC are you listening?

Add to that a solid mexican joint (for after the bars), three microbrews, a delicious gelato shop, a few great bookshops, and old time movie theatre and several artisenal coffee shops... and I'd say Staunton won us over.

Postscript: after sampling Staunton's, ahem, cultural offerings on Friday night, lets just say our ambitious 10-mile hike was downgraded to a four-mile walk in the park.

Staunton, we'll be back. And maybe this time we'll actually do the hiking we had set out to do.

Post postscript: We returned to Staunton for a subsequent weekend. We ate once more at Zynadoa, and then we sampled two microbreweries. We did not go hiking.