Music tends to draw us in wherever we travel. Find music, fun and more to do when you join the Independence Mountain Foliage Festival and Grand Privy Races. Look for crazy moments during the event that may include outhouse races on Main Street, along with pageant of potty princesses.
This unique event, launched in the early 1980s by then town manager Darrell Ward, draws quite a bit of attention to Independence. The town, with its population of 971, is located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, not far from the North Carolina line.
The festival kicks off in Early October at 9 a.m. with arts & crafts vendors and bluegrass music at the historic courthouse. There are kids' activities like pony rides, pumpkin painting and inflatable slides. Then at around 11 a.m. the real fun begins with the first heat of the double-elimination grand privy races. The races, which take place every 20 minutes, feature teams racing pimped-up outhouses past cheering throngs on Main Street. "Each team has two people in the front, two in the back and one in the hole," says event coordinator Carol Lundgren. "We have four pages of official rules for the outhouses and they must have wheels. Some people put brakes on them, some don't."
During the races, teams must perform a "fire drill" in which the person in the outhouse comes out and is replaced, with everybody else rotating a spot. Local Democratic and Republican parties race each other, with the winner believed to have a leg up in upcoming national elections. In 2008, the races were deemed by the Virginia House of Delegates as the official grand privy races for the state of Virginia.
Bring along your camera because the autumn leaves are usually at their peak color this time of year. "Independence is located in Grayson County and has beautiful fall foliage," Lundgren says. "There's Mount Rogers, the highest peak in Virginia, and the New River Trail State Park. Point Lookout Mountain, just north of town, is always gorgeous, and many folks go up to Mount Rogers and Whitetop Mountain on Sunday."
A special treat for those who arrive Friday evening is the Potty Princess Pageant. A spoof on traditional beauty contests, this pageant features female and male contestants, age 15 and up. "We've had some real doozies over the years," says Lundgren, "like the guy in the two-piece pink negligee with diapers and a mustache."
