The task of the day today was to visit Shenandoah Caverns near Mt. Jackson, VA, so we left Front Royal on I-66 west until we turned onto I-81 south to the Caverns. I initially thought I may have been premature condemning all the interstate highways as substandard in Virginia but we merely needed to travel far enough to ascertain that I-81 also has a rotten road surface. Nevertheless, it was not crowded and we were able to pass about 30 miles down the road without concerns other than avoiding road hazards like potholes and faults running down the center of the lanes.
The Caverns cost $23 a head which doesn’t seem too bad until you remember that Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico costs $10 for 3 days of access. You start the exploration by dropping about 70 feet into the caverns by a medieval elevator with a capacity of about 7 people without getting too cozy. The tours consist of about 25 people so it takes some standing around until they are able to deliver a full complement of folks to the tour start point. Once everybody made it to the start point, we were greeted by Olivia, our guide. She was nice enough but had one of those voices that makes you want to ignore her so I didn’t quite catch all the info she was trying to give. Nevertheless, the tour takes you through several different areas or rooms of the Caverns which are very interesting but all of them with plainly visible lighting fixtures & Romex electrical conductors which detracts from the experience. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that Romex is not rated for exposure to the environment and their lighting system was, therefore, not code-compliant if Virginia has adopted the National Electrical Code.
The Caverns tour is pretty short. If we didn’t have to wait on dawdlers and gimps, like me, the whole thing could have been wrapped up in about 25 minutes. It is all very pretty – I was just expecting a bit more.
From the Caverns, we drove east on Hwy 211 across the section of the Shenandoah Valley west of the Massanutten. As we ascended the Massanutten we ran into a highly localized thundershower that gave Charlotte’s wipers a run for their money, overwhelming them for short sections such that the road became almost invisible. We drove through the shower at about 20 mph until we emerged on the other side of it into clear weather. Weird.
The Massanutten is heavily timbered with hardwood trees, all of them just as happy and green as could be. We climbed through a pass at about 2200 feet still going east and then descended into the portion of the Shenandoah Valley that runs east of the Massanutten. We ultimately arrived in Sperryville, which is a neat little place with nice old houses mostly made from brick or stone masonry although we did spot some wood buildings which were also old and nice and quite tidy.
Departing bustling Sperryville, we headed north on Hwy 522 which is not a Virginia interstate highway and, therefore, perfectly sound with wide lanes, wide shoulders, clear lane and fog-line markings and exceptional paving. Partway back to our campsite, we randomly turned right onto Long Mountain Road which was a single-lane farm road running east and we decided to see how far we could go on it. Initially, there was simple but adequate paving which got a bit slimmer as we continued. Soon enough, the paving quit in favor of a well-graded gravel road but we continued because the scenery was so terrific. There are well-maintained farms (I guess – in the west we would call them ranches because there are no crops other than grass) with very healthy-looking livestock, predominately cows and horses. The farms are separated by wide clumps of hardwood forest. The now-gravel road continued and we did run by some muddy and potholed sections and some inclines with drainage gulleys that wandered freely from the ditch but, as a whole, the road was perfectly adequate for Charlotte’s enormous size. Charlotte is a 4 ton 2 wheel drive king-cab Ford F-250 turbo-diesel pickup truck that is only about 22 feet long.
We were probably about 4 miles onto the gravel when we encountered a Virginia plaster contractor stopped in the middle of the dirt road in a forested section due to a broken trailer hitch that had inconveniently separated his pickup truck from his plaster mixer. We sneaked between his road-clogging problem and the ditch and pulled up to ask if he needed assistance and to quiz him on the road ahead. He declined our assistance and happily explained that the road did indeed continue and we could make a big circle back to the highway if we merely followed his directions. I had my doubts about my ability to follow them but we foolishly continued down the road. As we moseyed toward someplace we encountered a bunny calmly eating in the road and reluctant to move and also a snake (which I probably erroneously identify as an eastern king snake) calmly sunning himself in the middle of the road. As we approached, first the snake looked like a mirage. As we got closer it looked more like a dead black snake. Once I put Charlotte’s enormous front paw next to the snake, he turned to look at the offending tire. He wasn’t dead.
We snapped a few pix of him while we could before he did a leisurely squiggle and disappeared under the truck. We didn’t want to get out and we didn’t want to squish him so we put Charlotte in park and gave each other stupid looks. After a bit, the snake came out the passenger side and continued into the roadside grass. We put Charlotte back in D and continued on until we found out we had not been as dumb as we thought and came back out at Hwy 22 albeit in a different place than where we went in.
After re-emerging from our little back country expedition, we diverted from our suspiciously empty agenda and skulked down a few other little side roads in search of nothing in particular, which we found in abundance if you exclude gorgeous countryside. We finally made it home to the Barbarian Invader.