Caroline and I recently had a quick getaway for a family wedding. My cousin who lives in Sanford, North Carolina, was getting married, and the wedding was held there.
This was a solo trip for myself and Caroline because our younger daughter was performing in a musical Saturday and Sunday of that same weekend, and our older daughter was finishing up her yoga certification and couldn’t commit to the date.
While we thoroughly enjoyed seeing my cousin get married, (she was the flower girl at our wedding, which will be 25 years ago in July!) seeing my extended family, and meeting some new people from the groom’s side of the family, this post will focus more on the travel and our AirBNB experience, since that is what this website is all about!
AirBNB as a tool to discover new places
Due to the logistics of the weekend, we decided to drive from New York City, and to stay in Richmond, Virginia. We also wanted to stay in an AirBNB, both because we run our own AirBNB business, and because we intend to use AirBNB’s ourselves when we kick off our travels later in the year.
About 3 weeks before our visit, I searched AirBNB using the filtering strategies I’ve previously written about. While there definitely were units available in Richmond, I was more excited when I zoomed out of the map a bit, and saw several listings for a smaller town close to Richmond, called Petersburg.
We live in a very big city (New York), have visited many other big and mid-sized cities in our travelling, and have found that we prefer to visit and discover even smaller places, that are more off the beaten path, especially ones that have a walkable town center with shops and restaurants.
In that light, Petersburg was a great find, a small town about 30 minutes south of Richmond. While we only had a short time in town due to the wedding, we enjoyed several restaurants and visited several of the interesting shops in town. We know that there are things we missed, so perhaps we’ll find time to come back some day. We had a similar experience when we visited Maine last fall, staying in an AirBNB in a small town called Brunswick, about 30 minutes outside of the bigger city of Portland.
So while many people see AirBNB as a tool to find hotel alternatives, or a cheap place to stay, or a way to find an apartment or house on vacation, I also see it as a discovery tool for interesting small towns to visit, which makes us really excited about our future travel plans.
Fantastic AirBNB unit
We absolutely loved our AirBNB unit. The owner purchased three side-by-side buildings 11 years ago, and has been restoring the buildings, and each of the units within, since then. He says he also has a day job, so I don’t know how he finds the time. He and his wife do the AirBNB check-ins, and the cleanings themselves, in addition to the renovations, yet they also live 30 minutes outside of town! An inspiration…
The buildings are old, but the renovations we saw were modern, high quality and very nice. The building itself has a very modern entrance, with a beautiful lobby, and a modern security system that connects to your smart phone to admit entry to the building.
The interior hallways were nicely done and stylish, down to a non-working fireplace with lighting that made it appear to be working.
The unit had one small bedroom, but a very large open space kitchen and living area with very high ceilings. The couches were comfortable and there was a kitchen island, perfect for working on my laptop. A nice touch were the beautiful vases lining the top of the high cabinets in the kitchen. An ‘interesting’ touch was the antique horse saddle in the living room!
We didn’t have opportunity to use the kitchen, but it was a very modern looking renovation and seemed to have everything one would need to prepare their own meals.
Sampling the restaurants and shops in Petersburg
Petersburg itself is an old city (crossroads for the railroads in the 1800’s and a key battle area in the Civil War), and the main commercial area feels old, but is definitely gentrifying and improving. It is also home to Virginia State University. The nicer restaurants and shops are in Olde Town, which is down the hill a few blocks towards the Appomattox River from where we stayed.
We had our eye on a particular British-style pub, but changed our plans after talking to the apartment owner. He clued us into a BBQ restaurant, called Saucy’s, that has been featured by Southern Living as one of the top BBQ restaurant in all of the south!
We love BBQ, so that was a recommendation we could not pass up! The food was amazing, and their Moon Fry dessert (deep fried Moon Pie topped with ice cream) was to die for.
He also recommended a casual spot for breakfast, Dixie’s, which was also outstanding. Breakfast featured ‘corn cake’ as one of the sides, which tastes like a cornbread but is fried up like a pancake.
The final food place we visited was a bakery called Buttermilk. The bakery items looked amazing, and tasted amazing, but what was different about this place was the wide variety of vegan options. They had nice looking vegan donuts, and we bought a vegan chocolate chip cookie for our older daughter back home. We had a Boston Creme donut that was amazing and fresh, because they filled the creme into the donut at the time we purchased it. They were already running out of items when we were there at 10am, so you know it is a hopping place.
We also visited about 4 different antique shops, which had lots of interesting items and was reasonably priced. Caroline was looking for a particular item, and while we came up empty, exploring the shops was a fun experience. One of the shop owners gave us a map of the various shops located in Petersburg, as well as a brochure highlighting antique shops in the south, so there is no shortage of places for us to come back to.
We did not realize that Petersburg also has a bustling arts scene, so that would be another thing to come back for!
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We were very happy to make this interesting find. Between the shops, the art scene, and the historical sites, we definitely could have stayed a few days.
We love how AirBNB allowed us to discover this interesting place, and that there is a world of additional similar places out there, waiting to be discovered. All it takes is ‘zooming out’ on the map from the big cities when searching AirBNB listings.
We are Scott and Caroline, 50-somethings who spent the first 20+ years of our adult lives in New York City, working traditional careers and raising 2 kids. We left full-time work in our mid-40’s for location-independent, part-time consulting projects and real estate investing, in order to create a more flexible and travel-centric lifestyle. 
Financial independence and early retirement is not something we originally focused on, but over time realized it was possible. Our free report, 
