Road Trip Day 2

We hit the road early for what we knew would be our longest and hardest day. We started out from Hagerstown, MD and ended up in Columbia, SC. We decided to take our time and we picked up the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Shenandoah National Park (it's called Skyline Dr. in this section). Well worth the $15 park entry fee. It was stunning. Gorgeous. This country of ours really is amazing!

We drove the last 50 miles of Skyline Dr. and exited out of the park onto the rest of the Blue Ridge Parkway. We drove about another 60-70 miles along this route. We took our time, stopping numerous times just to marvel at the scenery, to walk the dogs, and once to have a picnic lunch. The dogs didn't seem to impressed with the scenery but they enjoyed the new and different smells. We decided to get off the Parkway when we did because my sister (who suffers from car sickness) was starting to feel a little queasy. It is a windy, hairpin turn road and it is hard to get over 40 mph.

At that point, we hooked back up with 81 and headed south. We picked up 26 around Johnson City and took that into Asheville. We wanted to see Asheville. :-) We didn't see much of it, but what we saw, we liked! One of the best parts of the drive was going right over the Appalachian Mountains. We approached them from the northwest and crossed right over them to the other side. We really got the sense of approaching them and traversing over them. There was a definite beginning, middle and end to our driving them and it gave me a sense of scale of this mountain range in the middle of our east coast.

We pulled into Columbia, SC way late. Later than I expected. We were all so tired that we really didn't care too much that our motel (Red Roof Inn!) could have modeled for a Roach Motel. I'm being a little unkind. It had a marginally acceptable level of cleanliness and it did allow dogs. The dogs crashed, I crashed, Sherry crashed. It had been a long day of driving but we positioned ourselves perfect for an easy last day of driving.