Travel Update 8

Our big event this week was Shenandoah National Park, which we absolutely loved. It of course has it's own post. As does our visit to the Wright Brothers National Memorial.

Outside of those destinations, the week was a pretty slow one. We spent a total of three nights at a Brayley Pond, a camp ground in the George Washington National Forest in Virginia. It was a great free camp ground that gave us a chance to rest and recharge. We did a short hike around the pond on Wednesday.

Other than that, we just took some to hang out and let this kids explore.

 

Unfortunately it started to get pretty cold, so it was quickly time to move on. From there we continued south to Durham, North Carolina where one of our friends from Eugene is currently living. She kindly invited us out to drinks with her work friends, which was a lot of fun. It's always great interacting with other people.

We are also excited to finally be getting into basketball season. On Saturday, the Oregon Women's Basketball team took down team USA in a historic victory. Unfortunately we couldn't find the game televised anywhere (it was an exhibition game, so strictly speaking it didn't count). Instead we parked close enough to a Walmart to get internet and constantly check for updates from Oregon Live. Having seen highlights afterwards, our suspicions are confirmed - This is the team to watch this year!

Shenandoah National Park

Shenandoah National Park gets a lot of visitors every year, in large part due to the fact that it is only 70 miles away from DC and the large population centers around there. This is especially seen in their weekend visitors, since it's a pretty easy weekend trip down. Even though we were there off season, when we arrived on Sunday evening the park was swamped.

The main "attraction" in the park is Skyline Drive, a beautiful winding 105 mile road down a ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We had always thought that the Blue Ridge Mountains were a specific mountain range, but it is, in fact, an entire region of Appalachia. Or as wikipedia terms it: a physiographic province. Also - John Denver led us astray, they are predominantly in Virginia, not West Virginia. As is the Shenandoah River.

Nicerthannew.com

The views down Skyline Drive is stunning and there are tons of look out along the road to take in the sprawling views in either direction.

There are over 75 overlooks down the length of the road to stop and take in the view, which is amazing in both directions. 

There were also more hikes than we could possibly do, but we did do a sampling of the variety. The Appalachian Trail runs the entire length of the hike so we did a few miles on that. There were also tons of great hikes up to peaks with great 360 degree views. 

We also did a really nice hike down to look at some waterfalls. The waterfalls were not the most impressive that we've seen but it was a really nice hike through the woods and along a stream. 

 

Our main constraint on this park was where to stay. There are a lot of lodging options within the park, but unfortunately most of the camp grounds were closed for the season, leaving the more expensive lodge as the main option. The one campground that was open was a fairly reasonable $20 a night, but we decided to pass and drive out of the park for a free spot. We did Make use of their coin ops showers and laundry though. They were great facilities that apparently often used by AT through-hikers. So far this has been one of our favorite parks, largely because of the variety of things to do and see here.

 

Travel Update 7

One the things we wanted to see while driving through Connecticut was UConn. Located in Stores, it's a small college town with virtually nothing but the university.  Our plan was to put on our Duck stuff and walk around campus, but like most college campuses parking is not easy to find. It was also super rainy and gross. So we settled for driving through campus and taking pictures of the basketball arena. We're super ready for basketball season.

That night is Hartford, we mixed it up and instead of staying at a Walmart we stayed at our first Cabela's. We had been a Cabela's before but this one was something else entirely. We probably spent about two hours exploring the store. They have an aquarium! 

We also swung back through Pennsylvania to try to find the stickers that we lost in Travel Update 6. Unfortunately, even though we found our spot we couldn't find the stickers. Either they stayed on the bike rack longer than we thought or someone picked them up thinking they were trash. We're still bummed about their disappearance but we put the new ones up. 

For those of you keeping track of our RV maintenance we also had to replace the car battery. For some reason it kept popping open and leaked a bit of acid. It wasn't fixable, so it needed to be replaced.

In case you missed it, this time period also includes our trips to Salem, Plymouth, Cape Cod, Rhode Island, and Gettysburg but we decided that those all warranted their own posts.