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.

 

The Life, Death and Rebirth of the Sticker Map

One of our favorite gifts off of our wedding registry was a map for the back of the RV. It was a blank map with a set of stickers for each state so that you add each one as you go. We very dutifully took pictures as we put each one on, alternating who got to do it as we went.

              

Sadly, as we mentioned in Travel Update 6, after putting on Pennsylvania at our camp site, we left the roll of stickers sitting on the bike rack when we drove away. We didn't realize our mistake until we got to New Jersey and were ready to put our new sticker on. Having just crossed a bridge that was tolled in the other direction it would have been about 60 miles to get back to the camp site to try to find them. In hindsight we should have turned around, but we thought our best course of action was to try to repurchase the map off of Amazon to replace the stickers.

When we got to internet several hours later in New York, we discovered that our current map was no longer available. At this point it was much to late to turn back. We made the decision to buy a new map, that was a close to the same size as possible and have it meet us in Portland, Maine. Not fully ready to give up on the old map we stuck all the stickers on the new one while the base was still on it's cardboard.

     

Then we stuck the new map in the window, having both maps showing for a couple of weeks. We decided we wanted to wait until we could go back to our Pennsylvania camp site and make sure the stickers weren't there before we fully committed and peeled the old map off. 

So we lived the two map life for a little bit. 

 

But after checking to find the stickers, and not succeeding, it became clear that we needed to say goodbye to our first sticker map. 

  

And put on our new one. 

 

We kept the original map on the cardboard that the second one came on as a memento, even though we have no idea what we're going to do with it. 

And now, we're getting back to our old sticker map habits. 

Gettysburg

We arrived at Gettysburg fairly late in the day on a Friday and decided to start by getting the lay of the land and stop by the visitor center.  That left Saturday for exploring. However, the visitor center at Gettysburg is less robust than other visitor centers.  It is considered a "museum" and is behind a pay wall. The park doesn't have an entrance fee, so that probably evens out for most people. Unfortunately for us they don't allow the use of national park passes to get into the museum. 

There was plenty to do around the park without paying to get into the visitor center museum. We don't know what we missed, but there definitely was plenty to explore. 

There are several ways to explore the park including paying for a bus tour or hiring an official guide to come in your car and give you a tour. As always, we elected for the free version. We started the day with a ranger walk that left from the visitor center and gave an overview of the whole battle. It was called Three Days in 90 Minutes. It was well done and gave a good overview. 

Next we followed signs for the "Auto Tour." There is a tour throughout the park with stops and information at key points. It is a chronological tour and meanders around a bit. It ended up taking us most of the day to do these two tours. By the end, we'd had enough of the civil war for the day.

 

 

It is amazing, however, the extent to which the civil war defines the state of Virginia. Everywhere we drove over the following two days there were signs for battle memorials and historic sites. Not to mention the astounding number of confederate flags people were flying. We need to do more reading about this area and the mind set, but we have a hard time understanding the confederate flag flying. Many people are flying their confederate flags proudly next to their American ones which we find incredibly ironic. 

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.