{"id":5672,"date":"2021-05-29T22:59:21","date_gmt":"2021-05-29T14:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.huangyizhou.com\/?p=5672"},"modified":"2021-10-17T02:20:06","modified_gmt":"2021-10-16T18:20:06","slug":"20210529roanoke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.huangyizhou.com\/index.php\/2021\/05\/29\/20210529roanoke\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 1 of 2021 Memorial Day Weekend, Driving to Roanoke"},"content":{"rendered":"

First day of 2021 Memorial Day weekend. On our drive to Roanoke, Virginia, we visited the city of Lexington, Natural Bridge and Hanging Rock Raptor Observatory along the way.
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\"Natural<\/a>

<\/br>Natural Bridge<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

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Memorial Day weekend, 2021, my friend and I decided to spend the holiday in Roanoke, exploring the few popular hiking trails nearby (famed Virginia Triple-Crown).
\nThis was the first day of the long weekend. We left home at 9:20 in the morning, traffic was heavy most of the way. Yet besides a small traffic jam where I495 meets I66, which we avoided by taking detour into local roads of Vienna, we were moving at highway speed all the time. <\/p>\n

Battle of Weather Forecast<\/span><\/h3>\n

I have been paying attention to weather forecasts for pretty much the entire week leading up to our trip. While it\u2019s pretty clear that the last day of the long weekend would be sunny, most forecasts mentioned considerable chances of rain for the first two days. It’s more intriguing that the night before the trip, I found two leading weather websites of United States, weather.com and accuweather.com, gave two completely different forecasts for the following day: one said rain is inevitable while the other said don’t worry about rain.<\/p>\n

\"Weather<\/a>

<\/br>Weather Forecast<\/p><\/div>\n

In the end, weather.com prevailed as we drove into a constant afternoon drizzle.
\nI have had a few occasions before when I cared much about weather, and most of those times weather.com turned out to be the more accurate one. This experience decisively cemented my faith in weather.com. That’s when I learned both Google and Apple used weather.com data for their phone apps.<\/p>\n

Lexington, Virginia<\/span><\/h3>\n