 |
| Photo by Gina |
New Year’s Day, 2012, and we took a drive out to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah National Park in order to drive the famous Blue Ridge Parkway. It was an unpromising drive out – west from DC along a little bit of Route 66, where nobody was getting any kicks until Siena fell asleep, and then through various small and increasingly agricultural towns to the entrance, as far as I can tell, at Swift Run Gap, which we had reached on the instructions of the Garmin in our rented Nissan. There’s a point with these devices where faith kicks in. Unable to find a suitable address (Number 1, Skyline Drive, Virginia?) we gave it the broadest possible pointers and hoped for the best. It worked out really well: we entered the park quite far to the south, exited right at the top with a shorter drive home than there, and it only really started raining when we were near the end of our walk to Dark Hollow Falls. The setup of the park is odd. Having run a ribbon of tarmacadam all the way along the Blue Ridge, splitting a quite substantial wilderness area down the middle, the Americans (not all of them, obviously, but you know) decided to leave well enough alone. So the facilities thereafter are sketchy. Numerous view sites, a couple of lodges, a restaurant and camping store setup at Big Meadow, and that’s it. None of it, of course, operational at this time of year, except the signs telling us to watch out for bears, although not what to do if we don’t manage to. But what a drive: the Shenandoah valley with its patchwork farmlands and indeed the West to the west, the coastal plain to the east and miles and miles of bare, grey winter forest at various gradients of extremely steep in between. A couple of grey deer looking hopeful, a handful of tourists like ourselves who didn’t get the note about it not being the done thing at this time of year, some patches of sun then the swift arrival of weather in the mountains. We’ll definitely be back, because there are many trails we’d like to walk together, but having enjoyed the place in solitude I’m not sure if we’ll have stomach for the hordes. Driving home was an object lesson in American scale. The scenic route out was sparsely sprinkled with gift shops, wine cellars and farm stalls – any comparable route in SA would be more densely baubled – but the minute you start to get into the cities of the plain, it’s chains and strip malls and big box retailers all the way – huge, featureless, bleak and enervating, just horrible. And nothing in between. But the Virginia countryside, which we caught in some late afternoon light which set the grey woods ablaze, was beautiful.
