Hubba-hubba! Today we hopped in Charlotte the truck and cruised up onto the Skyline Drive which is the road that runs on top of the Blue Ridge in Shenandoah National Park from Front Royal to Waynesboro, VA. We got on the Drive at milepost 1 in Front Royal and exited westbound on Hwy 211 at about milepost 62. From there we continued west until we turned north on Hwy 340 back to Front Royal and our cozy spot in the Barbarian Invader.
This road is essentially the northern end of the Blue Ridge Parkway which we have been following since we were in Asheville back in mid-April. The Blue Ridge Parkway / Skyline Drive may be one of the most spectacular sections of road in the world although the speed limit maximum is 45 mph, which suits us just fine. From the Drive, if you look to the east you see the landscape of central and eastern Virginia descending toward Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. If you gaze toward the west, you look down into the Shenandoah Valley and over to the Massanutten, a huge ridge that divides the Shenandoah Valley into eastern and western halves. There is very little here that isn’t pretty.
The portion of today’s ride on the Drive started at an elevation of about 900 feet and ascended to just under 3700 feet before we left the ridge. The scenery, other than the exquisite views east and west, consists of dense hardwood forest with a few grass meadows sprinkled in and we passed from clear conditions to short stints where we were in the dense fog because we had driven into the clouds hovering around the tallest sections of Blue Ridge. There is a steep drop down into the Shenandoah Valley where you leave the dense forest and transition into nice, tidy farms with emerald grass meadows divided by undeveloped sections of lowland forest. This part of the world must get plenty of rain because everything is some shade of vibrant green. If it was always springtime, I could easily be perfectly happy living here.