DC was great.  But you’re not really on a road trip until you’re out on the open road, in some beautiful rural area.  Preferably overtaking a tractor or two for extra authenticity.

Fortunately, DC happens to be very close to two of the USA’s longest and most scenic parkways – the Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Together, these make up about 575 miles of gently (well…for the most part anyway) winding roads passing through some absolutely spectacular countryside – views for miles at every turning point.  To put it into perspective, that’s the same distance as driving from London to Inverness – but all on National Park designated roadways.

In total we spent 3 and a bit days cruising down from DC through West Virginia and down into North Carolina.  We loved it.

The Nature!

Oh yes, lots of nature.  Mainly to be fair in the form of nasty little beasties trying to eat my lunch time sarnies but also some proper stuff.  We saw some men on horses, some ground hogs (is that why it took 3 days?), lots of birds, plenty of insects, a snake (fortunately dead) and 2 dung beetles with requisite ball of dung (JUST managed to avoid the temptation to boot their dung off into the far distance).

We didn’t QUITE see a bear but apparently were about 10 minutes away from having done so. Quite a relief that we didn’t actually as at that point in time we had yet to put in place a formal “peeing your pants doesn’t count if it’s because there’s a bear” amnesty.  Now that’s in place I’m much more relaxed about a potential encounter with possibly the only wild animal who could kill you without blinking yet whose reputation (at least in the UK) is based primarily on the honey loving grizzly from that popular kids TV series, Gentle Ben….

We did however spend the next few days both practicing our bear scaring tactics as well as initiating an advanced awareness testing game of skill: “Spot the Predator”……

The Trees!

Do you like trees? Do you really, really like trees? Are you utterly fanatical about trees? Do you have borderline pathological personality traits regarding trees? Is your name Daniel Simon? Good.  Because on the Blue Ridge Parkway you are going to see a LOT of trees. Our record was probably a four hour section of a six hour hike with a view of … wait for it … trees.

The Great Outdoors!

The drive took us through some amazing countryside, including the famous Shenandoah national park, and for quite some way ran parallel with the Appalachian Trail (this is an INCREDIBLE trail running 2,178 miles up the Eastern Coast of the USA.  Some lunatics have apparently been known to hike the entire trail over the course of a few spare months.  (sans deodorant).  The perfect place to get our hiking on.

Walk 1 was short (well, 2.5 hours), deeply scenic and entirely wonderful.

For walk 2 we wanted a bit more of a challenge, so plumped for a 10.8 mile “moderate” trail, which proved to be a slightly unexpected six hour marathon comprising a steep 2,000 foot vertical descent followed by a (slightly less) steep 2,000 foot vertical ascent.  Through trees.  Did we mention the trees?

Boy we ate well that night.

Such a beautiful area and such a great intro to our road trip – really it’s hard to express in words.  So check out the gallery – the pics really do this part of the trip justice.