This is a retrospective blog of my seven-week exploration of Virginia along with a journey through the Shenandoah National Park and on down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Cherokee, North Carolina. 'Retrospective' means simply that it wasn't written during the trip, but is being written after-the-fact, a little over a year later. Baaswell Sheep accompanied me and is writing the blog in the way he's done my later blogs, since he's so good with the color commentary. Unfortunately, since I didn't plan for this blog back when I was doing the trip, my pictures are limited to the major attractions, but I'll try to make those galleries a little larger than I do in my later blogs.
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So, today we got that bad tire replaced, which meant spending a few hours waiting for the work to be done, so we walked over to a Martin's grocery store and put together a healthy lunch from their salad bar.
Once we got the van back, we headed up to Luray (pronounced as two syllables) wanting to visit the caverns (remember how we didn't get into the Natural Bridge Caverns earlier?) Well, we got up there and saw cars parked all throughout a field, which suggested strongly that they were swamped with visitors, too. Deciding we didn't want to brave the masses, we went on into the town of Luray to look around, starting off with a railroad museum in an old train station. We then wandered around town, found a nice bookstore, and finally got some ice cream before heading out.
On the way to Luray we'd seen this place that we could identify as a Dukes of Hazard (the 1980s TV show) museum, but it was totally packed with regular cars and the entry was even blocked off with traffic cones. Coming back, the cars and cones were gone, so we pulled in, wondering if they were even still open, but they were. Turns out they'd had a concert that afternoon with special guest Tom Wopat, who played Luke Duke on the show. My companion was more than happy to have missed those crowds and gotten the chance to tour the museum with hardly anyone else around. It's an amazing tribute to the show, and it's kind of eye-opening just how much connected merchandise was produced back then. They really marketed that show to the hilt, but it was quite popular, particularly with the Duke brothers always making big jumps with that souped-up Dodge Charger (AKA The General Lee). An amusing note: the picture of the front of the General Lee shows two signs in the windshield. The left one reads "Please Do Not Enter Vehicle". The right one reads "Please No Sliding Across The Hood"!
After getting back to Harrisonburg, we ended up at this little family sports restaurant, where my companion got a nice popcorn shrimp plate and I grazed on the side salad. It's been hot as can be the past couple of days, so we're looking forward to getting up into the Blue Ridge mountains tomorrow as we begin our drive down the Blue Ridge Parkway, which will sadly end our Virginia journey, but we'll still be spending more than a week in North Carolina before we head home.
While hanging out on the hotel patio tonight, we noticed how interesting the sunset was looking, so my companion started scouting around for a good place to take a few photos. Just goes to show that you don't have to be in a national park on top of a mountain to get to see a good sunset.
Please note that all restaurant and product names are used simply for referential purposes and links provided as a courtesy. Reviews are the sole opinions of the reviewer: no restaurant has paid to be listed here, and no restaurant is being explicitly endorsed. In other words, go out there, try them all, and form your own opinions!
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