| THE MID-ATLANTIC GETAWAY:
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 There are five restaurants, four tennis courts, two swimming pools and a children's playground. There's a well run full-service health spa much better than you'd expect in the usual small inn, a marina and an on-site sailing school. And there's the historic jaunt aboard the Miss Ann, a wooden 127-foot National Historic Register yacht built originally in 1926 at a cost of $205,000 for John French, a Detroit industrialist. It's been renovated since by the inn at a cost approaching $2 million. The yacht's now regular Whiskey Run reproduces today its trips during prohibition when guests sneaked across the broad river to neighboring Urbanna to buy contraband liquor. |
| Guests don't need to sneak today. All of Irvington with the village's 462 registered voters lies outside. It's , all created by big city entrepreneur, Bill Westbrook, a retired big city advertising executive. Westbrook co-owns a beautiful B & B, the Hope & Glory Inn, created from an old schoolhouse. Its website is fun like the B & B itself and also gives the history of the village at www.hopeandglory.com. Westbrook says, "Our B & B is romantic, whimsical and peculiar in that order. If you don't fall in love at the Hope & Glory, I don't think you're ever going to fall in love." |    |
| This could be the place: A study has shown that of all the small towns within 100 miles of Washington, DC this is Number 1 for household income. Says Westbrook, "We have the best of services, lawyer, dentist, accountant, barber all within a walk or bike ride. We don't have crime but what we do have are people with awfully big hearts. It's hard to be down when everyone waves to you as they go past." | |
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| Asked why he called his restaurant after a dog, Westbrook grins and says, "I'm not a cat person. I don't trust 'em. You never know what they're thinking. They don't forgive you: a slight goes on record." Teased that is attempting to gentrify the entire village, Westbrook replies: "I wanted to live in a great place and have fun doing it." | |
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The fun in this Northern Neck area is borrowing a Tides Inn bicycle for the three miles to Christ Church, checking out the Antique Mall and town museum in nearby Kilmarnock, heading to Lancaster to visit the Mary Ball Washington Museum, named to honor our first president's mother, and wandering through the 1669 graveyard at St. Mary's Whitechapel Church and, for returning visitors, seeing if the Steamboat Museum is making progress in Irvington, itself. |
And visitors do come back. Says a bellman at the Tides Inn, "Once we get 'em here, we got 'em!" Anderson's lead photo at ericandersontravel.com
is another of the Hope & Glory Inn |
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