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 5

Our second week of hurrying quickly across the country we didn't make any particularly interesting stops. However, we did stay at some really nice campgrounds. We wanted to do a very short, photo filled, travel update to show off a couple of places.

Waverly Lake, Illinois was gorgeous. We got into camp fairly early and stayed to hang out for a while the next morning. We even made a morning campfire to cook up a deluxe potato breakfast.

  

 

This section had some beautiful scenery but we didn't do anything very exciting as we were driving pretty quickly to make it to DC.

We did have an exciting incident happen with the RV. A few hours after leaving Lane Farm campground, driving through West Virginia we heard a popping sound. Shortly thereafter another, quieter one. At this point the RV became tricky to control. When going around corners it would make another muffled little pop and the steering wheel would shift in such a way that I needed to hold it at a different angle to keep it going straight. Luckily we were close enough to a small town that had a mechanic. We had broken a bolt in the upper control arm on the passenger side. Dave, the mechanic in Harmon, SC, was able to get it stable to the point of driving safely, but we would need to go get it fixed properly and re-aligned. While he was working on it, we noticed something else had gone wrong. Somewhere in our travels that day, we had lost our spare tire!

 

We got our RV fixed up at SOS repair in Winchester, VA the next day and continue on our way to D.C