Saturday, July 25, 2009

Back on the boat - almost ready to go

We're back on the boat after a 2 1/2 week visit to Cleveland and Chicago. The drive back to the boat from Cleveland started out as one plan and ended up differently. One of the joys of being retired is that you don’t have to stick to a schedule. We planned to drive the Skyline highway in Shenandoah National Park then spend the first night in a B&B in Staunton, Virginia. But we got to Shenandoah in the late afternoon in spitting rain and decided to do the drive the next morning. So we stopped in Front Royal, the town at the entrance to the park. Good thing we did, we didn’t realize that a drive of 105 miles with a 35 mile per hour speed limit could take 6 hours.

If you have never done this drive, it is one of the scenic wonders of the U.S. The park service sells a guided tour on CD that you can play in your car as you drive through. It gives you some history and describes some, but certainly not all, of the stops and overlooks on the road. We saw deer, both does and a buck, and a mother bear and her cub crossed the road right in front of our car. There are only about 200 bears living in the park and seeing one is apparently a rare event. We were lucky.

There are hundreds of miles of hiking trails in the park, ranging from easy ½ mile walks to back country overnight destinations; 95 miles of the Appalachian Trail run through Shenandoah. I walked about a ¼ mile of the Appalachian Trail, only 1,249 to go.

Having visited Fort Sumter in Charleston, where the first shot of the Civil War was fired, we decided to complete our war tour by visiting Appomattox Courthouse, where Lee surrendered to Grant. The house where the surrender was signed is a recreation. The original house was dismantled in the 1880s. Some entrepreneurs planned to ship it to Washington, re-assemble it, and charge admission to see where the war ended. But after they got it torn down, they never moved it to Washington. By the time the Park Service took over the sight, most of the house had been scavenged, so they had to build a recreation of it.

Back on the boat, we have a couple of boat repairs to make and then we’ll be ready to leave on the next leg of our trip. We may not post again for a couple of days. Oriental, NC, where we are now is a bit of a cell phone void, so we have to go to The Bean, the local coffee house, to get on the Internet. It has been a long time since I've been this removed from the online world, can't say that I like it much.

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