The National Park Service has two parkways that approximately follow the crest of the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia and North Carolina. One is called Skyline Drive which runs through Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. The other is the Blue Ridge Parkway which is a 469 mile long, two lane (one each direction), controlled access road that runs from the southern end of Skyline Drive south to the border of Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. Although I have driven Skyline Drive several times and had planned to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway on three different occasions the weather was always bad and the rain and mist made it pointless. When I checked the weather forecast for this weekend it was perfect for driving the parkway and, although I was too far north to drive the full length, I decided to drive the northern 180 miles on my way home.

Today’s activity was all driving as I traveled 370 miles from Somerset, Kentucky to Roanoke, Virginia. I could have joined the parkway further south but that would have made the drive so long that I would have needed to drive at dawn and/or dusk. My dash-cam has enough difficulty with daylight so challenging it with poor lighting seems like a bad idea and deer collisions are all too frequent at those times.  My route, therefore, was a mix of narrow country roads and highways but almost all of it was through the Appalachian countryside with hills, fields, mountains and forests as a scenic backdrop. The highlight came near the end of the day when I joined the Blue Ridge Parkway. This fully lived up to my expectations and I am looking forward to driving more of it tomorrow.

The map and video are here.

Two views from the parkway: looking eastand looking west The land on either side of the parkway is administered by the National Park Service but is not a National Park so you see herds of cows, small towns and other bucolic scenes as you drive. Here is an old mill, just at the side of the road, that has no longer used and has fallen into disrepair.