Birthday Bash: The Blue Ridge Parkway and Mount Mitchell

 

As I shared yesterday, our plan for the Saturday of our trip had been to tour the Billy Graham Cove and then drive to Mt. Airy, North Carolina, to finish touring the Andy Griffith sites we ran out of time to see a few years ago. But then our Biltmore day fell apart in a fat hurry, so we moved up the Billy Graham Cove tour to Friday afternoon. While we rested at the hotel Friday night, I talked about my visit to the area 12 years earlier and how Lynnette and I drove part of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and suddenly that sounded a lot more fun to us than a couple of hours in Mt. Airy. So we rearranged our Saturday entirely.

            We got up and had breakfast at the hotel, checked out, and went straight over to the Dunkin’ next door for coffee, because the coffee at the hotel was…abysmal. Then we started going the wrong direction for about six miles, figured it out, and got back on track. Hoped that wasn’t par for the course!

            We stopped at a Visitor’s Center, got our ornament souvenir and I got this nifty walking stick! I’ve wanted one for a few years, but I’ve never found one I loved until now. So fancy.

            If you’re not familiar, the Blue Ridge Parkway covers almost 500 miles between Virginia and Tennessee and makes for a gorgeous drive with lots of overlooks and some chances to hike along the way. I’d love to drive the whole thing one of these days and stop to visit some of the trails as we go. Alas, we did not have time for all of that on this day.

            We did drive a section of it, though, and stopped at all the overlooks to get some pictures. Breathtaking views for this flat-land girl. I was so incredibly thankful we had such a pretty day for the drive. The mountains are only pretty if they’re not sitting inside a cloud! (Had that happen on our honeymoon! The overlook was a solid wall of fog.) I won't post ALL our pictures, because you have an actual day ahead of you, but here are a few!

            We decided to drive all the way to the top of Mt. Mitchell, which is the tallest mountain east of the Mississippi. You can hike this mountain, but it would have taken the bulk of the day to go up and back down, and we didn’t have that much time. So we drove it and made a note to hike it on the next trip.

            If you ever come to do this trip, you can drive nearly to the summit, park, and walk the last few hundred feet to the top. They’ve created a beautiful overlook there with signs to tell you the mountains you see in the distance.

            The gentleman the mountain is named after is also buried at the summit of the mountain. We saw his grave while we were there.

            It was super busy when we were up there and hard to get good pictures, but we did our best.

            It does take about an hour to drive up and then another hour to get back down the mountain, so we elected to eat lunch at the only restaurant on the mountain. It was a bit of a splurge, but it was worth it to get to eat a meal on time, the views were amazing, the food was delicious, and the portions were so big that we had leftovers for dinner.   

            After we left the mountain, we headed toward Summersville, West Virginia, (via Dunkin' for some traveling coffee) which was our stopping point for the night. I totally missed the state sign for Tennessee, because I didn’t realize we were going there. I was also surprised to see Virginia pop up on a roadside sign. Apparently our new route took us a very different way! (We had one traffic slow-down in this section of our trip. It was all because of a tunnel!)

            We had dinner at a rest stop just inside the boundary of West Virginia, stopped at a THIRD Dunkin' for an evening coffee, just in case the hotel coffee was awful, and it was nearly dark by the time we got to our hotel. Ryan surprised me again with an upgraded room: a suite! So fun.

            We unpacked the car and tried to get some good rest, because the next day was an adventure beyond anything I could have imagined.