On the road again… Blue Ridge Parkway trip in Mocha Joe (posted from Panera Bread Co., Asheville, NC)
(This update covers 27 May-6 June)
Tuesday, 6 June-
Today we got underway from Julian Price campground by 0830. We stopped a few miles later at Linn Cove Viaduct to get info on Grandfather Mountain; we could see only a square on the map representing the mountain but nothing indicating where the visitor’s center is. It seems the Grandfather Mountain attraction is privately held so does not appear on the Blue Ridge Parkway map. A few miles later we drove off the parkway for a mile at Linville to the entrance. We were a bit surprised to see the price-- $14 per person. That seems like a lot to us but we went ahead. We stopped at the Nature Center and found the geological exhibit very good but the others only ‘okay’. But behind the Nature Center were ‘habitats’, which were large zoo areas for eagles, otters, deer, bears, and cougars. Those were very well done; they were large enough to allow the animals quite a lot of space to roam and were large enough that the animals could completely get away from people if they wanted. That made it more of a hit-or-miss thing about seeing the animals but I’d think it’s much better for them. The habitats were also very well integrated into the mountainside. The bear habitat, for example, was built around a very large outcropping of boulders, some of them bigger than a house. One set of bears consisted of a mother and three cubs which had been born this past January. Grandfather Mountain is working with the North Carolina wildlife department to prepare these bears for release in the wild. The cubs were incredibly cute and fun to watch as they climbed up and down the trees. They would appear to be stuck and unable to come down then would figure it out and half-slide, half-tumble down.
We then drove further up the mountain to the hiker’s parking lot and had some lunch, then hiked the Bridge Trail up to the Mile High Suspension Bridge, then back to the van to go back to the parkway. Along the way back to the Parkway we stopped at a roadside stand and bought some nice, dusky-looking unfiltered apple cider which we hope will transform from apple juice to a cider in a week or so.
Our next stop was the Museum of North Carolina Minerals. They do a very good job with the exhibits, allowing you to explore this esoteric subject as deeply as you like.
Later that afternoon we turned off to Mount Mitchell State Park. Mt. Mitchell is the tallest peak east of the Mississippi and the park had the feel of a Canadian park. The views were terrific driving up the entrance road and then the road to the top parking lot. We stopped along the way at the campground to check it out but it turned out to be only for tents. Though the parking lot was flat and deserted and would have been a good place for us (and had a great sunset view), the rangers said we’d have to occupy a tent overnight. We have a screen-room-size tent along and probably could have gotten away with using it, that would have been a lot of toting and setup when we knew there was another more traditional campground not far down the parkway. We drove on up to the top parking lot and after the obligatory walk to the top we returned via a mile-long nature trail. The lichen-covered trees and rocks reminded us a lot of a hike last fall in Maine’s Baxter State Park at the base of Mt. Katahdin.
After our walk we thought we’d see if the park restaurant’s sign claiming to serve fine food was true. We were pleasantly surprised to be served a truly excellent North-Carolina-style barbeque. We were splitting the dinner to save a little on cost but the barbeque was so good we almost ordered another dinner but then thought better of it. Labashi preferred the taste of the pulled pork as served; I loved mine drowned in the vinegary-hot sauce.
We drove on in to Asheville that evening and went searching for the Wal-mart using directions our waitress at Mount Mitchell had given us. But that Wal-mart turned out to be closed so we had a grand tour of Asheville before finally finding the Wal-mart. This one was a good one --- we found a flat spot to park well away from the store and when it closed at 2200 traffic stopped and we could sleep undisturbed.
Monday, 5 June-
Today we started off with a stop at a small visitor’s center at Rocky Knob where I bought a copy of ‘The Jack Tales’, a book about southern Appalachian folk tales starting with ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. I believe this is the book Ranger Jamie was talking about.
We continued on to Mabry Mill where we learned about making sorghum molasses by squeezing out the sorghum juice with a horse-drawn press and then evaporating the juice into molasses. We learned more details about whiskey stills and we saw a bark mill which turned out to have been patented in 1871 in Lancaster, PA. I very much enjoyed being able to examine the equipment and see how it was built and how it worked. A few miles down the road we stopped at the 1892 Mayberry Country Store where I bought some sorghum molasses to try. We had lunch at the Mountain Restaurant in Meadows of Dan. I ordered a large vegetable soup and grilled-cheese sandwich. When my waitress left I asked Labashi a question that vexed me; was I going to have a larger-than-normal bowl of vegetable soup or would it be a regular-sized bowl of soup containing larger-than-normal vegetables? It turned out to be both. Labashi had an excellent BLT.
Later in the day we stopped at the Blue Ridge Music Center where I was tempted to buy a video which the label promised would teach anyone how to play the bones, the spoons, a washboard, “and various body parts” to make bluegrass music. It was just a little too expensive at $24.95.
Later we stopped at Brinegar Cabin, where we spoke briefly to the young Ranger out working in the garden. He was planting beans and gourds. His goal this year is to grow a gourd and make a guitar out of it. He’s a string-musician in his spare time and saw the plan for a gourd-guitar in one of the Foxfire books. But he’s not sure what he’ll do about finding a substitute for groundhog gut for the strings. He says he doesn’t think he could handle the real thing.
We finished the day at the campground at Julian Price park where we again were challenged to find a flat-enough parking spot. But we finally spotted one in the E-ring and since one’s all we need, that’ll do ‘er for tonight. We spent the evening reading and blogging and acting foolish.
Sunday, 4 June-
We continued south on the Parkway to Peaks of Otter that morning. This area of several mountain peaks is in the Otter Creek drainage but it’s thought the name comes from early Scots settlers who had belonged to the Otter Clan in Scotland. Another theory says the use of the word ‘otter’ comes from a Native American word for apple (that word sounded like ‘a-TAR-ee’ to my ear). We had read that it’s a very strenuous two-hour hike up to Sharp Top Mountain (the highest of the Peaks of Otter) but it’s possible to take a mini-bus to a point within 500 yards of the top. A one-way ticket was only $5 so we thought we’d take the bus up and walk down looking for wildflowers along the way. That turned out to be a great idea. The bus trip took the exhausting part out of the climb but that last 500 yards was still impressive. The narrow trail wound around the peak and it felt like you had to be very careful of your steps; a fall off the trail might not kill you but you’d certainly be hurting when you stopped sliding and rolling into the trees and rocks below. The top yielded an impressive view in all directions. It wasn’t a perfectly clear day but the views were still spectacular. The trail wound right up to a smaller boulder on top and we were very glad for the low wall along the stone steps leading to it. There had been eight or nine of us in the bus but we were all spread out so by now we were alone on top but for one twenty-something guy who chose to stand on top of the stone wall. Any little slip could have caused him to fall to his death (and we were getting occasional wind gusts) but this dummy nonchalantly took out his camera and started shooting. Labashi eventually asked him what his name was so we would know for the rangers who would be coming to retrieve his body. He just chuckled. Seconds later his snap-on camera case-half accidently fell from his arms and happened to bounce inward. You could read on his face that he realized he had just been very lucky. He wasn’t about to admit he was being a fool but did he sit down astride the wall and carefully re-stow his camera case.
Our walk down was very pleasant. It turned out our decision to take the bus up was a good one. The trip down took us an hour and twenty minutes and we went down a heck of a lot of steep steps. We did stop several times to look at the blue lobillia, bleeding hearts, jack-in-the-pulpits, and a red-tailed hawk (we saw this one from above for a change) but our stops were brief. About half-way down I jokingly said we hadn’t seen anything interesting for awhile and we were due. Almost immediately an exquisitely-colored bird we had never seen before alighted with a flourish in the tree just ahead of us. It stayed just long enough for us to memorize its odd red-splotched breast, white wings, and black head. At the bottom of the trail is a nature center. We learned there that the bird we had seen was our first rose-breasted gros-beak.
Manning the nature center today was Ranger Jamie Parker, a very capable young woman of about 25. We had her to ourselves and talked for quite a while—a half-hour or so. We learned that she knew Ted Hughes (the homey ranger-in-overalls at the Humpback Rocks Mountain Farm Museum) and that she herself had been the youngest ranger ever in the National Park Service. She had first volunteered at age 14 and had become a full ranger at 19. We talked poisonous-versus-venomous snakes, swallow-tailed butterflies (tigers and zebras), wildflowers, birds, and her growing up in a Park-Service-provided single-wide trailer with her Dad, a park law-enforcement officer and her mom, a park dispatcher. And we spoke of Jack--- the Jack in the coral-snake rhyme “red-on-yellow, kill a fellow, red-on-black, friend of Jack”. Jamie told us there’s a whole series of Jack stories and we can see a book about them at the Visitor’s Center.
After we had lunch in the parking lot, a fellow rolled in on a KLR650 motorcycle like my #2 bike. I spoke with him at some length about his experience with it. It turns out he also owns a Voyager and has put 153,000 miles on that one so he considered the 11,000 miles on his KLR to be minimal. I was happy to learn, though, that he has had no problems with the KLR and has done nothing to it since new. We talked of all things KLR for twenty minutes or so. As we separated, he extended his hand and gave me his name and where he lives in Lexington, VA and told me that if I ever needed anything in the Shenandoah Valley, just give him a call. That doesn’t happen everyday!
After lunch we took a nearby two-mile loop trail from the Visitor’s Center to the Johnson Farm. This is a farm exhibit on a subsistence farm the Johnson family started living on in 1852 and finally gave up on in the 1930’s. The farm is kept as it looked in the 30’s. We had told Ranger Jamie that we were going to walk in to the farm and she told us that the ranger there is a new guy—Rob-- and probably won’t have much to say. That did indeed prove to be the case. Rob is from Huntingdon, WV and hasn’t yet had a chance to research many of the details at his new post. The most interesting thing we learned from him was that his grandmother would tell him stories about the witches in the Huntingdon area. She believed in witches both good and bad and claimed that each witch can only do one thing to you. We started trying to follow up on that for more info but other visitors came and each time we’d try to get back to him he was busy with someone else. Hopefully we can meet again (I feel a Fall trip coming on!)
We continued south to a campground at Roanoke Mountain. The campgrounds are odd here on the parkway. They are old CCC campgrounds originally built in the 30’s and there’s very little flat ground. The camping areas tend to be built in very hilly areas where they cut in a place for you to park your car and you are to carry your tent and cooler and other gear up or down hill to a picnic table and small level spot for the tent. These small parking cutouts all lean one way or another, making it tough to find a suitable place to level off Mocha Joe and therefore level off our bed for the night. So far we’ve been able to find spots close enough to level but it’s only because the campgrounds are only lightly used that we’ve had enough choice to find one close- enough-to-level for us.
Roanoke Mountain, like Otter Creek, had a music event going on. After supper we walked down to the little amphitheater and listened to blue-grass for an hour or so until dark.
Saturday, 3 June-
Today we again headed south on the Parkway. We stopped at the James River Visitor Center and learned about the James River and Kanawha Canal. It was apparently George Washington’s idea in 1774 to connect the James River from Richmond to the Ohio River (and therefore to the Mississippi and to New Orleans) via the James, New, Greenbriar, and Kanawha Rivers. But wars and financial problems plagued construction and by 1851 it had only been completed as far as Buchanan, VA. And for much of its length it was only possible to use smaller freight boats known as bateaux. To its credit, there were some 500 bateaux in use between Richmond and Lynchburg at its peak. But railroads doomed the canals to failure and in 1879 the Richmond and Allegheny Railroad bought the canal and laid track on its tow paths. Lock 7 of the old canal was reconstructed near the visitor’s center in the Sixties. On the way back from Lock 7 we came upon two groups of tiger-swallowtail butterflies, forty or more grouped together in round patches only about a foot across. Among them was one zebra-swallowtail.
After touring the lock, we took the Trail of Trees in the park and tried, with varying success, to match up the identification plates with the trees they were supposed ot be identifying. We knew it was going to be fun when the first plate described a bitternut hickory which had obviously been cut down some time ago. But we enjoyed the sunny and airy day and did enjoy the puzzle.
After lunch in the parking lot, we headed for Lynchburg and Thomas Jefferson’s get-away-from-it-all plantation at Poplar Forest. After our visit to Monticello, the tour of Poplar Forest complemented what we had learned there. Jefferson built a unique octagonal house using many French and classic influences. He had inherited the property from his wife’s father and was happy to take over the successful estate but ran it from afar at first. It was run by an overseer for its tobacco and wheat production for some eight years before Jefferson decided he needed an escape from all the visitors to Monticello and commissioned the house. He used Poplar Forest as his hideout when the British sought to capture him and take him to England for trial in 1781. But it wasn’t until his retirement in the early 1800’s (1806, I believe) that he turned his full attention to Poplar Forest.
Interestingly, Poplar Forest was in private hands until 1984 and it only now is being reconstructed as accurately as possible.
Our tour guide for Poplar Forest was, like the guide at Monticello, very well-versed in Jefferson’s history and the history of the property. After the house tour of about an hour, we spent the rest of the afternoon on the grounds, touring the underside of the house (a small museum there), a wing of the building which is under reconstruction, the French-inspired lawn, the slave quarters area (he had between 60 and 100 slaves working there), and modern-day archeology and reconstruction exhibits and the gift shop. As we stood looking at the archeology exhibit, the chief field archeologist was coming in at the end of his day and invited us in for a personal tour of the shop. He tells us they have discovered a massive trench which they are excavating to determine its purpose—there is no record of it in any documents. One of the neatest things he showed us was a large fragment of a clay pipe bowl, in which its owner had inscribed ‘good pipe’. Cool!
Afterwards we checked out the local Wal-Mart to see if we’d like to stay there. But thought it had no signs prohibiting overnighting, its parking lot was very small and extremely busy; cars were just pouring in and out of it. And it being Saturday night, that would have been one noisy campground. We headed back up to the Parkway and camped at Otter Creek campground. We lucked out there--- the bathrooms were out of commission due to delays in construction of a new sewerage system so they were only charging half price-- $8. And when we checked in we learned there was a free informal bluegrass gathering and we were welcome to join in. We selected a campsite near the music and enjoyed it through the evening.
Friday, 2 June-
Sherando Lake is not far from Waynesboro, VA so we decided to take the longer way back to the farm museum and do a little shopping in Waynesboro. We first came upon Virginia Metalcrafters which I had learned about in my previous trip but had not visited. There we found a large showroom of upscale metalcraft, everything from garden art to candlesticks, candelabras, fireplace backs, etc. Labashi found several items she liked but didn’t buy for lack of freight room in Mocha Joe. But maybe we can stop by on the way home if she likes.
Then we stopped at Rockfish Gap Outfitters, a full-service outdoors shop. I was looking for a map of the George Washington National Forest (which they didn’t have) and some sneakers and ended up with a good pair of light-hiker shoes (40 per cent off!) and Gazetteers for Virginia and North Carolina. The latter will help us find our way on the back roads we inevitably wander onto.
We then stopped at the Artisans of Virginia shop and admired the very expensive art work. Afterwards we went to the nearby Wal-mart and did our shopping for the next several days-worth of food.
The highlight of the day, though, was the visit to the Mountain Farm museum at the Humpback Rocks Visitor’s Center. The museum consists of buildings moved to the site in the 1950s to represent a typical mountain farm of the 1850s. The great thing for us, though, was meeting Ted Hughes. Ted looks like a country fella in his bib-“overhalls” but he retired from a job with the University of Virginia several months ago. He had been volunteering at the farm for the last 17 years and they were interested in keeping him on so offered him a job. His father and grandfather had been carpenters. His family had lived nearby since the 1740’s. We got very lucky and had Ted to ourselves for the better part of two hours. We talked about everything from how he got his job to how to build a broodhen shelter and a weasel-proof hen-house and why the root-celler wasn’t designed right. It was Ted who had built the rabbit-trap and the bee-gums nearby. We also saw a bear-proof razorback pen and an ashes-drainer for making lye soap, all new to us. Upon departing we told Ted we hope to see him this Fall.
By the time we left the farm it was getting late so we again went down the mountain to Sherando Lake to camp for the night. We feasted on chien-chaud-avec-vin and took an after-dinner walk as the sun set. We took the Cliff Trail, which turned out to be somewhat overgrown. I stepped within inches of a small copperhead, seeing him only as he flinched from my nearby step. He pulled back into a tight coil and shook his little tail in the dry leaves, making a sound that was more of a flutter than a rattle. Labashi got me a stick and I gently encouraged him off the trail and into the woods. It was amazing how he disappeared in plain sight in the leaves and underbrush. If he was moving you could see him but otherwise he was invisible. Very cool!
Thursday, 1 June-
Today was to be another hot day but we were headed to the mountain. We spent the day at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello—and what a great day it was. Monticello was wonderful. We spent the first several hours at the Monticello Visitor’s Center which has an extensive (and free!) exhibit about Jefferson’s life and has hundreds of his and his family’s personal possessions on display. We then spent the rest of the day at Monticello. It was indeed hot in the sun but in the shade the breeze was all we needed to stay comfortable. We took the House Tour and ours happened to end just as the Garden Tour was starting which ended just in time for the Plantation Tour. The guides were very good—they seemed to know everything there was to know about their subjects. And they didn’t shy away from the controversy about Jefferson and his slave girl Sally Hemmings. They provided a detailed history, including early reports of it while Jefferson was still alive as well as oral traditions from the slave families and DNA test results. Jefferson was certainly remarkable and yet his life was so affected by personal tragedy.
We finally left Monticello at 1630 and drove up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. But it was starting to rain by then so our stop at the mountain farm display at mile marker 6 was cut short. We decided we’d drop off to the nearest campground and come back tomorrow. That took us to Sherando Lake, a CCC-built park in the George Washington National Forest. Though it was raining hard as we entered the park, the rains soon let off and we spent a nice quiet night in Mocha Joe.
Wednesday, 31 May-
We loaded up for a fairly open-ended trip to the Blue Ridge Parkway and beyond. My motorcycle trip last week was great but I had succumbed to the temptation to just keep riding and missed seeing a lot. It was great as a motorcycle trip but now I wanted more of a nature-and-history trip and wanted Labashi to come along to see this beautiful area.
We didn’t start packing or any prep until this morning but have it pretty well worked out now and we were on the road by 0930. We were in no hurry so I started taking back roads. Before long we were outside of Gettysburg and realized we could swing by Blue Ridge Summit and take some pictures of the church Labashi’s dad designed. And once that was complete we decided we weren’t far from another church he had designed in Greencastle so went there too. Then we headed down I-81 for just a few miles and turned again to back roads. We drove over to Route 340 and stopped for a break at a garden-statuary business with oddball stuff. Though the old sign say’s it’s something like ‘B and N Grocery’, their business card now calls it “Neato Outlet”. They had some amazing statues, including a spectacular $28,000 bronze of a Native American princess in a war bonnet and astride a giant eagle (!!?!). They also had a $9000 statue of a very cool looking rhino (!!?!). And they had a lot of junk--- like a 1980’s Yamaha motor scooter for $700, and burl-wood furniture, etc, etc. Interesting place!
We drove on to Front Royal but instead of taking the Skyline Drive, we took 522 to the east of the mountain ridges and hit a Virginia Byway, Route 231. That was a wonderful drive all the way to I-64, where we turned for Charlottesville.
At Charlottesville we looked up the local Wal-mart but they had no-RV-parking signs up. But next door was a Sam’s Club up on top of a hill and we know Sam’s Clubs nationwide also have a policy of allowing RV parking when they can. The Wal-mart parking lot was pretty small and very crowded so it made sense that they can’t allow RV parking but the Sam’s Club hilltop parking lot was huge and uncrowded. We checked with the guy at the door and it was indeed ok to stay.
We then drove off to the nearby Chili’s restaurant and bought a fajitas dinner to go and went back to Sam’s and feasted. Afterwards we walked to a nearby DoubleTree hotel and bought a paper and read the papers in the nice big lobby chairs, looking to see if there were any plays or special events tomorrow but we didn’t see anything.
We had a great night at Sam’s. Unlike Wal-mart, the store closed at 2200 and then at 2300 they turned off the parking lot lights. It was very nice, quiet night (other than the lights coming back on at 0400 for an hour for the lot-sweeper!).
Tuesday, 30 May-
It’s another above-90 day but I want to try to working a little in the heat so I mowed the lower section of the lawn for an hour and a half in the morning. Then Labashi and I brought our air conditioner over from storage and installed it. Later we drove into town to look at more light fixtures. After we returned home I got out in the heat again at about 1630 and mowed for another hour and a half to finish the mowing in preparation for our trip.
Monday, 29 May- Today was a hot day (92 degrees) so I thought I’d to see how I’d do jogging in the heat. I rode the bike down to Rocky Ridge Park and slow-jogged a loop of about four miles from the baseball field parking lot to the far end and back. That pretty much did me in for the rest of the day, though. I spent most of it planning our next trip in Mocha Joe and we decided we’d leave Wednesday.
Sunday, 28 May- I took Labashi to the Patriot News Artsfest in Harrisburg. We took the Miata and drove the back roads to the event to enjoy the beautiful top-down weather. Labashi was looking for some garden art and saw a few items but they too expensive. But we were very happy to be there for the boardwalk fries and a very good old-style lemonade. Afterwards, we took another back way home and along the way stopped at Pinchot Park for a walk. We went into the Nature Center and talked with two volunteer college students. It turned out they had been in Florida on spring break the same time we were down there so it was interesting to talk about where they had been and what they had seen.
Saturday, 27 May-
Today I worked on email and the blog in the morning and then rode the Concours over to Pinchot for a jog. I did the four-mile loop from the Conewago Day Use area to the dam and back once again, this time in more heat. Afterwards while walking around to cool off a bit I noticed the Nature Center was open. I went in and chatted with a young ranger who seemed to know her stuff. I asked about the water quality of the lake and the every-third-year drawdowns and she was very aware of them though she has been here only a short while (a month or two). The park was busier than normal today as would be expected for today. The ranger says the only problem they are currently monitoring is some wooly adelgid on a few hemlocks at their satellite parks (Sam Lewis and Susquehannock) but Pinchot is adelgid-free.
