Blue Ridge Parkway

Monday, October 2

The morning after our visit to the Biltmore Estate we packed up our vehicle and headed toward Grandfather Mountain. We were approximately 90 miles away from our destination and our path was to be the famous Blue Ridge Parkway. With the wonderful experience we had the day before I was not expecting to be as impressed on day two of our adventure. I am happy to admit I was wrong. For those of you that are not familiar with the Blue Ridge Parkway, it was built right after the great depression in an effort to help generate jobs. The parkway is over 400 miles long and it was the first of its kind. It connects the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina.

Our specific path that day was from Mile Post 394 - 290. The parkway is a windy road and the maximum recommended speed is 45 m.p.h. in designated areas. On average we drove 35 m.p.h. There are numerous scenic overlooks you can pull off the main road and park at. These are incredible but they add time to your journey.

There were a few key stops we made that are worth mentioning. The first one was Mount Mitchell. Just before the peak there is a restaurant that has a fantastic overlook where we had lunch. Kristi kicked two biker locals out of their window table so we could have the best seat in the house. After lunch we drove to the peak but could not actually get to the official peak site because it was closed. The second stop was Little Switzerland. We stopped here to look at the shops and decided it would be better to move on but agreed next time through we would visit longer.

The third stop was the Linville Caverns. This was a stop we had planned on and ended up being a true test of my ability to manage my claustrophobia. Our tour guide for the caverns had a dry sense of humor and probably was going to play dungeons & Dragons that evening (likely lets his buddies into the caverns after hours for real gaming effect). The tour (consisting of 12 people) takes you back into the caverns 600 feet, the walkway is narrow and the clearance is less than 5 feet in places. There is one part of the tour when you walk into a section so narrow you have to walk sideways in a single file. This section ends in a room where several people can stand while the others are spread out along this sliver of a catwalk shoulder to shoulder. Once everyone has stopped, the tour guide shares with us we are standing over a bottomless cavern, "...we have used sonar and can verify it descends at least 250 feet but when we brought divers in they could only go to 50 feet before risking being trapped...". Next he asks me to reach into a cove area and flip a light switch on. Once I do this the tour guide continues, "...if you look below your feet, you will see you are standing on a small man made bridge that is suspended over the bottomless cavern...". When I looked down to view this, the only thing that prevented me from hauling out of there like the Hulk was that I had fortunately been last in line (first out of this Indiana Jones death trap of doom) and physically next to the tour guide. We learned on the way through the remainder of the tour that during the Civil War, deserted soldiers hid in these caverns for up to a year. The last part of this tour was a demonstration of "pure darkness". Apparently when there is no light present your eyes can not focus on anything to adjust to the darkness and if you are exposed to this for more than six months you will go blind. But don't worry about that because after just two weeks you go crazy. Our tour guide positioned everyone to hold the hands of their tour mates and turned out all the lights to expose us to this. While we were in "pure darkness" he explained how people used to enter these caverns with a lantern or flash light and after exploring for hours they would drop their lantern into the water or lose their flash light and be trapped in total darkness with no way out. After he joked about letting us try to find our way out, he turned the lights back on and we exited the caverns.

Our last pass through worth noting was the Lin Cove Viaduct. It is a short piece of the road but what makes it special is that it is basically a long stretch of suspended bridge which was built alongside the mountain.