The story below is a preview from our January/February 2018 issue. For the full story Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
It's no secret Roanoke has plenty to offer, so it's no surprise how visitors can fall quickly in love with the region. Meet a few newcomers as they share their experiences and affection for their new home.
Rivers and Roads Photography
Steve Ambruzs, Pedal Powered Placemaking
The best destinations often come at the end of a long and winding road. For Steve Ambruzs, owner of Downshift Bikes, Roanoke was just that destination. A fisheries biologist and 2001 graduate of Virginia Tech, Ambruzs was familiar with the region, but never imagined that he would make it his home. With a scientific research career that required he live in more far flung areas of the country (California, Nevada, Wyoming, Indiana, Canada, Alaska), after 15 years, Ambruzs found himself “done with the cold,” as he put it, and ready to change careers and open his own bike shop. So, in 2015, Ambruzs and his partner, Beth Oates, a lawyer, began to plan their big move to the East Coast.
For over a year, Ambruzs and Oates traveled across the Southeast in search of their future home. Cities like Asheville, Charleston, Chattanooga and Charlottesville, with their close-knit, outdoor-oriented communities, seemed promising, and the pair spent significant time getting to know each city. Roanoke, it turns out, wasn’t originally on the list.
“We originally picked Charlottesville, but then struck out on finding jobs and a house and retail space that were affordable,” Ambruzs says.
It was then that Ambruzs discovered a tweet from Roanoke Outside about YP eXperience, a young professionals networking conference in Roanoke. Recalling that event, Ambruzs explained that it was the turning point for him. “Everyone at the conference was interested in making Roanoke a better place to live. And that was it for me; I wanted to be in a place that felt this way.”
Within the space of a few short weeks, Ambruzs’ partner found a job in the city, the pair bought a house near Morningside Park, and Ambruzs discovered the perfect retail space for his new venture—Downshift Bikes, a commuter-geared cycling shop and cafe. Although the people of Roanoke originally sold the city to the pair, cost of living played a huge role and allowed them to not only buy a house, but start up a brand new business at the same time.
These days, Ambruzs is busy running Downshift Bikes and exploring Roanoke through the lens of bicycles and good friends. Downshift Bikes itself serves as a gathering place with its attached café where one can grab a cup of coffee or share a pint with others. For someone so new to Roanoke, Ambruzs has certainly made it his home and is excited to share it with other newcomers. As he so succinctly put it, “the people here are the best part of Roanoke,” and Roanoke is certainly lucky that it can now count Ambruzs as one of its people.
Emily Savoie DiRoma
Putting the Commute in Community
Roanoke is surprisingly blessed with a plethora of higher education choices within a one or two-hour drive from downtown. For a medium-sized city in a rural part of the state, 25 different colleges and universities are located within the greater Roanoke region—something that brought one couple together after a year spent four states apart.
Emily met Tom DiRoma in graduate school at Indiana University of Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh, where both were working toward their degrees in Student Affairs in Higher Education. A unique degree, the program prepares students for careers in higher education, and the couple knew that their odds of landing jobs at the same university—or even in the same region—were slim.
“When we looked for jobs, Tom was able to find one at Lynchburg College as the Assistant Director of Student Involvement, but I ended up at Georgia Southern in Statesboro, Georgia,” she explains. After a year of traveling back and forth between the two states, they knew something needed to change, and fast.
Each applied for jobs closer to the other, but Emily lucked out first and was hired by Ferrum College to be its Coordinator for First Generation Success. With almost 50% of Ferrum’s student body comprised of first generation students, DiRoma’s role was not only crucial for the college’s success, but also allowed her to live with her now-husband. Since the two work in polar opposite directions (Ferrum is 45 minutes south of Roanoke while Lynchburg College is just over an hour northwest of the city), “most of our time is spent in a car,” DiRoma laughs.
“For the first eight months,” DiRoma says, “I actually hated it here. But then I met a lot of friends through the YP eXperience conference last spring and everything got better.”
Though the car is king, when not driving back and forth to her job, DiRoma loves to get outside on the greenway and nearby trails and also try out new restaurants.
“We live in Wasena, so we’re close to all the action, which makes it great,” she says. “It’s easy to get downtown and be a part of it all.”
When asked what helped her make the switch to loving it here, DiRoma pauses and says, “It really helped when I realized a lot of people aren’t from here—we’re not so different after all.”
Jess Mays
Big(ger) City Lights
Moving to a new city in a new state where you know no one can be terrifying. Doing so with just two weeks notice is even more daunting. But for one of Roanoke’s newest and loudest cheerleaders, Jess Mays, the leap of faith she made in February 2015 (which was, as she claims, “by the seat of my pants”) could not have worked out any better.
A native of Beckley, West Virginia, Mays grew up not too far from Roanoke, but had never even visited the city prior to moving here for her job at Carilion. After graduating from Concord University in Athens, West Virginia, Mays spent a gap year at home working and hoping to eventually apply to a Physician Assistant program. With that goal in mind, she began to apply for jobs in the healthcare field and, on a whim, applied for her position, never thinking that it would pan out. Fast forward three weeks, and Mays found herself moving into an apartment in Old Southwest and exploring her brand-new town.
For Mays, the enduring appeal of Roanoke is that “there’s just so much to do.” As she says, “Once I discovered downtown, I never looked back,” and it’s easy to see the “big city” appeal compared to her sleepier hometown of Beckley.
Almost every night of the week, you can find Mays hunting down good live music at Martin’s Downtown Bar and Grill or Five Points Sanctuary, riding her bike on the greenway or checking out one of the new breweries or restaurants that seem to be popping up all over town. For a while, she even worked as a server at Wildflower Café during the evenings just so that she could meet more people and get to know her neighborhood better.
“Roanoke,” Mays explains, “is a very easy place to be new. I can go anywhere and never feel out of place.”
But it’s not just the welcoming atmosphere of Roanoke that has made Mays’ transition so easy. She actively sought out hiking buddies on the MeetUp community, volunteers at every festival she can and was willing to head downtown and simply try to make new friends.
“You really quickly realize that a lot of the young professionals here are in the same boat as you, so it’s easy to make connections,” she says.
Maybe there is something special about this city though. As Mays put it best, “I love my job, but I love Roanoke too—it never gets old here, there’s always something new.”
Becky & Matt McKimmy
Christmas Light Kismet
One December evening in 2015, Becky and Matt McKimmy found themselves, like so many others, walking hand-in-hand on Westover Avenue audibly gasping at the awe-inspiring light display. On that one street in Grandin Village, neighbors join forces and combine electrical cords to create a magical winter wonderland worthy of any Christmas romantic comedy. For a couple that had been trying to decide where in Roanoke to make their home, this seemed like kismet.
“Right here, this is where I want to live,” Becky announced, pivoting on the sidewalk—and, exactly one and a half years later, the couple moved into that exact address.
Becky, a web developer for AdoptAPet.com, and Matt, a system operations manager for Ride Amigos, both grew up in the Roanoke region and went to school at Virginia Tech. Matt’s graduate degree transferred them to Indiana, however, and they stayed in the Midwest for 10 years. Eventually, the draw of the mountains (both are avid cyclists and Indiana “is just a little flat,” they laughingly explain) and the desire to be close to family brought them back to Roanoke.
“For over a year we lived in Matt’s parents’ house in Bedford and started visiting neighborhoods while we saved up for a down payment for a house,” Becky says.
During this time, the couple also began to meet new people through CoLab, also in Grandin Village, and through cycling. For the McKimmys, “It was important for us to live somewhere with good local food, community engagement around local food, a neighborhood with high walkability, and a strong biking community, and the Grandin Village area of Roanoke fit the bill.”
Fast forward to the serendipity of finding a fixer upper house on Westover Avenue, and both Becky and Matt have become truly engaged with the Roanoke community. From Becky starting a knitting group at CoLab (where they both also work since they are remote workers) to both being involved in the Roanoke greyhound rescue group and joining group bike rides like the Mustache Ride and Tweed Ride, the McKimmys couldn’t imagine a better place to live. When asked where his favorite place was in Roanoke, Matt laughed and replied, “sitting on my front porch because it’s there that we have a real ‘neighborhood feel,’ and that’s definitely, to me, the best part of Roanoke.”
Gina & Jeff Schauland
Hopped Up on Roanoke
“Deschutes 2 Roanoke” was successful in many ways—it helped Roanoke’s economic development partners bring the Oregon-based brewery’s east coast operation to Roanoke; it put Roanoke on the national scene with a viral grassroots marketing campaign started by Michael Galliher; and it is now bringing couples like Gina and Jeff Schauland to Roanoke to make the city their new home.
Even before Deschutes made the announcement to locate its East Coast operations in Roanoke, the Schaulands had been eying a move to the Southeast for some time. Native Californians who called Bend, Oregon, home for over 10 years, the East Coast promised plenty of outdoor adventures with even milder seasons (per Jeff: “It gets old being snowed into the valley”), access to larger cities (per Gina: “You can be in so many major cities within just six hours!”), and tons of history and charm.
“There’s just no history on the West Coast—everything is so much older here and there’s so much to explore,” Jeff explains.
For these veterans of the brewing industry—Gina is Deschutes’ Digital Marketing Manager and Jeff was a lead brewer for a microbrewery in Bend—Deschutes was certainly a draw, but not an end-all, be-all. For Gina, it was the people who made her want to call Roanoke home.
“Everyone was so excited when we visited, not just about the brewery, but the community feel of the area brought me here,” Gina says.
For Jeff, it was that community vibe and excitement as well, but also the lure of the outdoors. As he put it, “we wanted to find a place similar to Bend—a place with a great community and affordability, as well as the trails and outdoor activities.”
Officially Roanoke residents as of October 2017, Gina and Jeff bought a house at the base of Mill Mountain (“It’s so awesome to hop on your bike and be at a trail within minutes,” Jeff exclaims) and have busied themselves in exploring everything Roanoke has to offer—including the tight-knit community that first attracted them to the city.
“Roanoke is a place where it’s easy to meet people. Just find the influencers in the city,” Gina says, “and you’ll instantly be connected with a great network.”
... for more from our January/February 2018 issue, Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!