A Four State Day


And on the 4th day the sun shone!  The temperatures rose to 22 degrees.  It was a gorgeous day made even better by the spectacular scenery…but I get ahead of myself.

We had a leisurely pack up this morning in the sunshine and it appeared we were destined to have an early departure.  It was not to be.  A Park Ranger came along and realized that we were from Ontario and started up a conversation.  We learned lots about the local area and about Pennsylvania.  It is always nice to talk to the locals.

Sue had another two lane highway day planned so the pace was ‘slow’ once again.  We traveled south through a series of valleys dominated by prosperous Mennonite farms.  Every square inch of the valleys is farmed.  I think this is the only way that the state has any agriculture because this State is hilly.  The small towns that we went through had mostly seen their better days.  The Park Ranger had told us that Pennsylvania has never recovered from the closure of the coal mines and the steel mills.

Now for the title.  Today we had a four State day.  We left Pennsylvania behind, entered Maryland (for about 10 minutes), entered West Virginia (for about 30 minutes) and ended up in Virginia.

We are camping in Shenandoah National Park Big Meadows Campground.  We are about 50 miles onto the Skyline Drive.  This road was whacked through the mountains and spends most of the time at the top of them.  There must have been 25 ‘overlooks’ (Canadians would call them lookouts) where we could see for miles down through the valleys.  Rarely did we go for more than 2 or 3 hundred metres in a straight line all the while going up and down.  It was a truly great drive.  And all the time the sun shone!!!

Distance Traveled = 420 km and a whack load of fuel was burned.  Wildlife Sightings = Grey Cheeked Thrush, Blackburnian Warbler, Red Tailed Hawk, Kestrel, Eastern Bluebird, Eastern Towhee, American Redstart, Catbird, Brown Thrasher, Deer (on the road and lucky to be alive), Black Bear (wandering through the campground about 4 sites down from ours).

View from overlook Shenandoah National Park


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some Final Thoughts

Image
I have always found it difficult to write the final blog.   This one is no different.   As we pulled into our yard last evening, reality hit…this adventure had come to an end.   But we have so many memories. Being on the road for 3 ½ months, we traveled 22,742 km through 23 States and 1 Province.   We know that we will be asked, “What was your favourite place that you visited?”   That is impossible to answer.   We saw and experienced so many things.   The variety of landscapes in the United States is simply ‘mind boggling’!   It has so many beautiful National Parks and we had the pleasure of visiting quite a few of them. It is time to wrap this up.   We would like to thank all the people who have taken the time to follow our travels.   It has been fun to share our experiences with you once again. We would also like to thank all of our friends and family who shared in and made our adventure possible.   Without your help and support Sue and I would not have been able to lea
Read more

Up One Side and Down the Other

Image
We drove north today to South Dakota’s capital City, Pierre.   It is pronounced ‘Peer’…only the Americans can pronounce a clearly French word in such a manner.   Pierre has a population of only 14,000.   It is the 2 nd smallest US State Capital.   There is also nothing there.   If you wanted to tour their capital buildings, you had to give them 48 hours notice…not sure what that was about.   Didn’t matter, we probably would not have anyway! What we did get to do today though, was drive up one side of the ‘Mighty Mo’ (The Missouri River) and down the other.   The river is a big one.   In places it is 2 miles wide.   It has a large water shed and this is the river that caused a lot of the flooding problems in the late Spring and early Summer.   It is still running far higher than usual for this time of year.   It dumps into the Mississippi.   We can only imagine how bad things must have gotten down in Louisiana after we left there…the river was already pushing the limits of its
Read more

A Family Connection to Plantation/Slave Ownership???

Image
Wednesday June 5, 2019 We were off to visit a sugar cane plantation today and made an interesting discovery…more later. We visited the Destrehan Plantation, a large plantation along the Mississippi River.   We joined a guided tour of the original plantation house built between 1787 and 1790 by only 8 men.   Our tour was with a bus tour…no we were not on the bus tour…we just had to endure the presence of a large group of people…and you know how much I like crowds…not!!!   The plantation has a long and storied history.   It began as an indigo plantation and by 1800 switched to the more profitable sugar cane.   It was large…one mile wide and stretching 8 miles from the banks of the Mississippi River.   By the beginning of the Civil War, it had 200 slaves. It continued growing sugar cane until the early 1920’s when it was sold to a Mexican Oil Refinery.   It then became their headquarters and was abandoned in the late 1950’s and sat vacant for over 20 years.   It was a mess when
Read more