6/6-6/14/17
Current location: Elkmont Campground, Smoky Mountains NP
We left the shores of Lake Erie early with a day full of interstate highway ahead of us. It’s very obvious to us when we are in travel mode vs. exploratory mode. The key things to be researched on our phones are how long the day is going to be, a bagel place for breakfast or a deli for lunch, cheapest gas prices along the route and any unnecessarily complicated twists and turns in what one would consider a direct highway for hundreds of miles. No such issues on this day as we have covered the I90/I80 drive from Ohio to New Jersey nearly a dozen times over our driving careers.
Thankfully on this day we were able to stop at one of my favorite deli’s of all time, a staple of my college years, The Goosey Gander in Bethlehem, PA. We made this detour in mid-afternoon and enjoyed a wonderful sandwich from Tony who is a Lehigh institution himself. We made a quick drive through campus before heading to the Welcome to New Jersey sign on I78.
We spent the next couple days making the rounds of Milltown and Spotswood visiting family. We got in a run at an old cross country stomping ground at Thompson park and eventually made our way south slightly to the rehearsal and wedding of a good friend of ours. Lara was a bridesmaid so we partook in the evening of wedding practice and great Italian food. The day of the wedding Lara had bridesmaid-ely duties for much of the day so I took the chance to get a run at the other main cross country stomping ground, the famed Holmdel Park.
Although my pace was not even in the same ballpark of the last time I ran these trails with any ernest, I have to say the course was still as fun as I can remember. I will say, though, that having now run significant hilly, even mountainous, runs the famous “bowl” did seem drastically smaller than it was made to be in our high school days. It was nice reacting to the tiniest parts of that course when the memory of a specific tree root or the tangents to take between course markers or the slight rise as you pop out of the trees in the last 1/4 mile to the finish as the dirt trail fades to a big grassy field (I know a few of you are nodding your heads right now). After an enjoyable, albeit warm and humid, run I stopped to grab a slice of pizza and at a brewery on my way back to the hotel. Big surprise, right?
The wedding was a great time and it was nice catching up with some old friends from college and seeing how everyone is doing.
We spent the weekend visiting family, climbing on the roof to complete some family chores and watching Lara’s dad pitch in his baseball league (a beer league for retirees, this is not!). We packed up our belongings once again, jamming them into the Subaru and pointing south and west. Back in Colorado we had switched out the van for the Subie. Here we left behind another beloved member of the journey as Rooney stayed back in New Jersey with my family. Given we’d be heading to hotter and hottest climates (with a vehicle sans a functioning air conditioner), some national parks that didn’t allow dogs and partaking in some water sports in the couple weeks we’d be gone we decided it better to let him hang out in air conditioning, playing with his girlfriend Lacy. From what we hear, Rooney is enjoying cold concrete basement floors and going for tons of walks.
With our destination once again unknown we headed through central and southern Pennsylvania with the original intention of getting to the edge of Shenandoah National Park. However, with a stop at and drive through Gettysburg and the discovery of some nice waterfalls in Maryland we fell short of our plan. It’s a good thing we were back on exploratory mode for a couple weeks. No set plan, a few random ideas scattered about the southeast US and a tank full of gas is all we really needed once again.
We made camp that night at Cunningham Falls State Park and took a stroll in the evening to the namesake falls. The water cascaded down a few sections of the falls and has worn much of the rock smooth. There were a few other groups there but mostly quiet and the hike to and from was a nice mile or two through the thick east coast deciduous forest. We considered sneaking onto the Camp David property that was only a couple miles away through the woods but decided spending a good amount of the remaining portion of our trip in a federal penitentiary was not ideal. We hadn’t really considered the lack of temperature fluctuation on the east coast in June so we spent a toasty night in the tent with little air flow, a theme we’d be stuck with for a couple of weeks.
The next morning we hatched plans to make our way through West Virginia to get a run/hike in. WV was the final of the lower 48 states that I had yet to do something active in (run, hike, bike, ski). We mapped out a 4-5 mile loop that left from Harpers Ferry, WV and climbed up to the Appalachian trail. We sweated our way up about 1,000’ and partook in some of the overlooks along the trail before descending back to the Shenandoah River where it meets the Potomac. The humidity was in full effect and a dip in the river at the end of the run was quite necessary.
After cooling and drying, we made a short drive into Harpers Ferry National Historic Site and happened upon a walking tour that was about to start. We hopped on the bus that drives you to the edge/top of town and walked along with the NPS Ranger who’s knowledge of the area, the history, the people and issues that made Harpers Ferry famous was impressive. We learned all about the town, the early settlers, the civil war which mostly decimated the town having switched hands between the confederates and the union 6 times, the biracial Storer College started shortly thereafter and the early pioneers of the civil rights movement. The tour was particularly interesting because it did not shy away from the fact that Harpers Ferry has history both inspiring and transformative but also misguided, bigoted and tragic. Overall, the tour was extremely interesting and we were really lucky to happen upon it.
The rest of the day we continued to sweat out our lack of air conditioning as we headed south and, mercifully, higher into the Shenandoah mountain range. We hopped on the famous Blue Ridge Parkway, running almost 500 miles down the spine of the Appalachians. It has dozens of overlooks as it pops back and forth from the east to the west side of the ridgeline of the mountains. We called it a day at the Big Meadows Campground with a few hundred fellow campers.
The next morning we did a short hike up Hawksbill along the Blue Ridge Parkway and enjoyed cooler temperatures overlooking the 360 degree views of mountains covered in vast forests. It has a very different look than summits in the rest of the country but the overall feel and crispness of the air is all too familiar.
We’d spend the rest of the day driving south out of Virginia and into North Carolina with our sites on Raleigh and…air conditioning.