This is a retrospective blog of my seven-week exploration of Virginia along with a journey through the Shenandoah National Park and on down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Cherokee, North Carolina. 'Retrospective' means simply that it wasn't written during the trip, but is being written in hindsight a little over a year later. Baaswell Sheep accompanied me and is writing the blog in the way he's done my later blogs, since he's so good with the color commentary. Unfortunately, since I didn't plan for this blog back them, my pictures are limited to the major attractions, but I'll try to make those galleries a little bigger than I do in my later blogs.
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We took it easy this morning and slept in, then walked around the Big Meadows area a little and had lunch at the main restaurant at the Big Meadows Lodge, Spottswood Dining Room. The food was good, but the service was a little slow. After that, we took care of necessities and did a couple loads of laundry, sitting outside and enjoying the mild air while the machines did the dirty work. Once that was done, we were able to get out and hike again.
Just north of Big Meadows is the parking area for Rose River Falls, another of the falls we had not seen before. Our goal this trip was to knock a few of those off our bucket list, though we hoped to see one or two of the falls we'd been to previously. This one was ...
After our waterfall hike, we returned to Big Meadows, spent some time resting and relaxing, then got dinner at the Big Meadows Wayside. During our last visit, they had been remodeling the place, and the whole time the restaurant was closed, reopening I kid you not the very day that we had to head home. Having that restaurant available this time was very helpful, as it put three options within easy reach: the Spottswood Dining Room, the tavern downstairs (both in the lodge proper), and the wayside restaurant out near Skyline Drive. We tried a "Turkey Gobbler" sandwich: think Thanksgiving on a bun. It starts with turkey slices, add gravy, then dressing and mashed potatoes, with a little cranberry spread on top. Sounds strange, but my companion said it tasted pretty good to him.
We'd discovered The Point on our very first visit to Shenandoah. If you can brave wading through waist-high grass at close quarters, you can go out onto a large rock and get an amazing view of the western valley below. This time, we went out there to watch the sunset and were not disappointed in the least. Once the show was over, we carefully made our way up to the parking lot, where we came to realize it was a new moon night, and being so far away from any source of light pollution, the stars were vividly clear. It was the kind of view that most people can only enjoy inside an artificial planetarium, only this was the real thing. It's a shame you have to go so far from home to get such a powerful insight into the universe, but that's life in this day and age. (Sorry, we don't have any constellation pictures: we didn't have a camera capable of taking such low-light pictures unfortunately.)
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