Click on a photo to enlarge it.
For the first two days we drove along "Skyline Drive" in Shenandoah National Park, which is a scenic drive through
the park with a lot of lookouts and various walks. The drive goes along the backbone of the southern end of the
Appalachian mountains, so the views are good. We also did a total of 10 miles of trails over the two days, to
waterfalls and views. We saw lots of squirrels and also spent some time watching deer munching away at various
mushrooms growing at the base of trees. You could actually see the food travelling down their gullets as they
swallowed!
Unfortunately, it got very foggy at 4pm on Tuesday so we drove back down into the valley for the night. But the
fog was still there the next day and it was raining so we spent the day at a campground, baking and working on
the computer. On Thursday, the weather was still bad so we decided not to drive the last part of the Skyline
Drive, but went to Charlottesville, a university town. We hunted for a parking spot, but couldn´t find one. So
we drove to the library and used the free internet for 30 minutes. Then we went for a quick walk to take a look
at the university and then went back to drive off the car park.
Kirsten was driving and as she drove to the exit of the car park she didn´t like the look of the dip - where the
car park goes steeply down to the road and immediately rises again to the road - and where we always get problems
with Winnie because his back end just gets stuck. She saw the problem but still kept on driving ... And we got stuck!!!
The last time we got stuck, we could dig ourselves out because the ground was hard gravel. But this time, it was tarmac!!
No chance of digging us out of this one. We couldn´t go forwards or backwards!
As we got out of Winnie to take a look at our plight, a police car came along and decided to come and check us out!!
Fortunately he was a nice man and I think he was quite impressed with our solution to the problem ... We got out every
single piece of wood that we had in Winnie and our thick floor mats that are in the drivers cabin, and used all of it
to raise up the back wheels. Then, as Helen drove inch by inch, Kirsten kept moving the wood and mats from the back
of the wheels to the front, so that in a rolling fashion, we could keep Winnies back end higher up than the surface
and finally get him out of being stuck! At that moment, we decided that we would never be able to get rid of all the
wood we had ... ever!!
After a well deserved cup of coffee and a piece of cake, we made the mistake of driving back up onto the mountains
to the start of the Blue Ridge Parkway. This parkway is a continuation of the Skyline Drive along the Appalachians
but is no longer part of the Shenandoah National Park. The Parkway is 459 miles long, going through Virginia and
North Carolina and ending up in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Our plan was to drive its length and doing
as many of the trails as possible. But as we got up into the mountains again, we hit thick fog - real pea soup! We
went into the visitor centre and found out that hurricane Frances had done a lot of damage to the southern end of
the parkway and had taken with it great chunks of the road! Consequently, virtually half of it was closed. So at
least it had been worth driving up to the centre to find that out.
On the way out, we nearly had an accident pulling off the car park as a car without lights came speeding out of the
fog at us!! And they had the cheek to beep their horn at us!! It seems the Americans drive without lights and as fast
as they can when its foggy!! We managed to get back down into the valley in one piece and, the next day, it was still
foggy on the tops so we changed our plans altogether and headed along the freeway directly to Great Smoky Mountains
National Park.
On the way, we stopped off at a Burger King (I know its not the healthiest, but we don´t go very often!). It was
actually fortunate that we did stop there - not because of the yummy cheesecake that they had just introduced (!),
but because we heard about a bad accident on the highway further south that had closed both sides. So we got our map
and spoke to people inside Burger King who had been stuck for hours in a 10 mile long traffic jam, and worked out the
best route to avoid it. So Burger King worked for us!!
We finally got to the "Smokies" late Saturday evening and got a real shock! The towns just north of the park were
like Las Vegas - traffic jams, crowds, everything we wanted to avoid! We found out that October is the busiest time
of the year because of the beautiful autumn colours. We overheard one woman say that she hadn´t seen autumn colours
for 16 years! She was from Florida, where they don´t have autumn or winter!! The Smokies is also the most visited
national park in America! So we´d hit the crowds big time, but we still decided to stay.
On Sunday, we drove to the visitor centre and saw a 14 mile traffic jam to go over the mountain road that goes across
the middle of the park from Tennessee into North Carolina!! (The park has the state line running through the centre
so that half is in Tennessee and the other half in North Carolina). We avoided the jam by going to do a 5.6 mile walk
up to Rainbow falls where Helen had to go rock scrambling to pose for a photo in front of the falls. What she has to
do for the photos!!
