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The Blue Ridge Parkway

I fueled up and left Roanoke, then headed up onto the nearby Blue Ridge Parkway about mid-day.  The parkway is an amazing and singularly-unique drive in America.  It's a two-lane road that runs north-south along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains for 469 miles from Front Royal, Virginia to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina, averaging between 3,000 and 4,000 feet in elevation.  Like the Natchez Trace Parkway (see News: June 29, 2001), which is also maintained by the National Park Service, there are no commercial facilities allowed on the Blue Ridge Parkway and trucks are prohibited – even (and thankfully) my Duel-ish trucker friend in Roanoke.

	Above:  Entering the Blue Ridge Parkway in western Virginia.

For the next several hours, I drove north on the Blue Ridge Parkway, pulling off every now then to soak in the incredible vistas, either looking east down onto the Virginia piedmont or west down into the Shenandoah Valley.  That's the same "Shenandoah," by the way, that I used to play (albeit rather poorly) on my Hohner harmonica.  I used to take my harmonica with me wherever I drove or hiked and "Shenandoah" was always one of my favorite tunes.

Late in the afternoon, I drove into Shenandoah National Park, which straddles the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains and lies at the end of the Blue Ridge Parkway.  The beautiful campground here was, amazingly enough, only about half-full and I spent a very pleasant evening there while cooking up my favorite dinner once again:  bratwurst and beans.  What else?

Unfortunately though, the biting black flies came out in force the next morning, so I decided not to linger in the campground.   After doing a load of wash at the NPS laundromat, I headed back onto the Blue Ridge Parkway and ate a quick breakfast of donuts and Diet Pepsi at a pullout that overlooked the gorgeous Shenandoah Valley.  No, the donuts weren't Krispy Kremes but they were still pretty good – and very sticky.  My favorite kind.

Above left:  Looking east from the Blue Ridge Parkway into the John-Boy Walton country of central Virginia.

Above right:  And on the other side of the crest, this is looking west into the Shenandoah Valley. 

Above left:  A typical pastoral view along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Above right:  Looks like fun, huh?

Left:  A National Park Service farmstead along the Blue Ridge Parkway, with two goats at the cabin entrance (like Walmart greeters). I thought the guy in the overalls was just some hick.  But as I discovered, he's actually the Parkway Superintendent – and a really nice guy.

Above left:  Entering Shenandoah National Park.

Above center: Camping at Loft Mountain campground in Shenandoah National Park, on the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Note the extension cord from my truck to my laptop computer.  I have an AC/DC inverter that plugs into my cigarette lighter to charge my laptop and digital camera batteries.  Normally, though, I charge up my batteries during the day when I'm driving.

Above right:  One of strangest coincidences of my travels happened back in 1985 when I entered Shenandoah National Park.  The ranger at the entrance booth turned out to be Cary Wilson, a former student of mine at the University of Wisconsin.  In fact, Cary told me that I had been his inspiration for applying with the National Park Service, because I had worked as a BLM ranger in Colorado.

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