Fall in Virginia

Our plan has always been to see the fall foliage in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, so after Connecticut we head south in that direction and stop in Virginia.  Being an avid hiker I have seen a couple documentaries about the Appalachian Trail and they always talk about the Great Smoky Mountains, Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley and how beautiful it is so I just had to see for myself.

We stayed at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia which is really a 100 mile road through the mountains called Skyline Drive where 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail also run through, criss crossing the road in many locations.  At the campground Tim checks the TV in the van to see if there are any channels and he is surprised that the antenna is actually picking up several TV stations and even more surprising a lot of them are international news.  I take a look at the map and immediately see the reason for this… sitting here in the woods, we are very close to Washington, DC, who knew?  It is very hard to keep up with our orientation to other things, sometimes we even forget what state we are in.  Something I could NOT answer however is why the cell phone had no service! Arrrgh!

Weather was great, sunny and cold, a couple days the highs were only in the 50s.  One morning it was 46 inside the insulated van when I got up.  We went on a ranger led hike on the Appalachian trail and it turns out this 100 mile section of the AT in this park is actually one of the easiest parts of the 2,160 mile trail that goes from Georgia to Maine.  We saw part of the AT on Mount Washington in New Hampshire and I am sure that part is no picnic.  Being around this hiking culture makes me feel like I should plan something big.  Not sure if a thru hike is for me, and definitely not a thru hike in the East, but something big.  In the park the AT is marked with these posts:

The trees are not very colorful here this year and after talking to a couple people we realize that this is due to an ongoing drought.  This has been the story we have been hearing in all our travels, unusual weather.  Most of the Eastern US has had a hot summer with little rain.  They say the leaves will just fall off the trees without much display of color.

I have heard about the beauty of the Blue Ridge Parkway and after reading up on it I see the road actually connects Shenandoah National Park with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Parkway is part of the National Park System, it is like a road that is a national park, not unlike Shenandoah National Park.  We started out on the Blue Ridge Parkway with the intent of driving the whole 469 miles, stopping at various NP campgrounds along the way.  The road is very curvy and slow going, speed limit is 45 mph. After one day, 150 miles and one overnight on the parkway we decide it is just too slow and the views are not that incredible so we decide to pop off the parkway around Roanoke Virginia.

We make our way to a Virginia State Park, Natural Tunnel. We are finding that the state parks are really great places to camp.  Most of them have nice updated campgrounds with showers and there is always something to do in the parks.  A lot of them have hiking trails, lakes and visitor centers.  The Natural Tunnel State Park has a rock tunnel with a chair lift going down to the bottom.  The tunnel has railroad tracks going through it which are still used today to transport coal. All very interesting.