Good news for all of you who enjoyed the road trip blog: I've decided to keep this blog going as a travel one. This holiday weekend, Cara and I were able to add to your list of National Parks - and it did not disappoint.
We still have until June 2017 on the America the Beautiful pass, a pass that gets your car into any National Park fee-free. With that in mind and an invite from Cara's family to go camping just outside the Shenandoah National Park, we knew that we'd be visiting our eighth (!) National Park of the year this past weekend.
The campsite was a private one, and it wasn't anything to write home about. Let's pick up with the park.
It's actually somewhat comical that Cara and I originally thought about biking to the park - we stayed about five miles away from the park entrance - and the trail I had found online, the Dickey Ridge and Snead Farm trail, was only five miles into the park.
Ten miles on a bike doesn't sound too bad. The comedy, though, comes in when you realize that the elevation change from our campground to the Dickey Ridge trail is a roughly 2,000 feet increase.
That wasn't happening.
So, on Saturday of Labor Day weekend, we ended up driving in, and it was the right call because along with Cara and me, her parents, their dog, Juneau, and her aunt and uncle, and their dog, Titan, joined us in the park. The bad part was that we found out at the entrance that the Dickey Ridge trail was closed off to dogs because of a recent bear attack where a dog died.
That was OK, however, as we found another trail, part of the Mount Marshall Trail, about 15 miles into the park that would give us some nice views.
That was the plan, but we didn't get more than a mile in before needing to take a stop and admire the beauty of the Shenandoah Valley.
As the photos above show, the weather was perfect hiking weather. It was in the upper-60s with a light wind. The clouds would provide the occasional shade spot. But when you're hiking in a densely wooded area, shade is abundant. Still, it was a beautiful day.
