Southwest Virginia and Lessons Learned

After moving all of our possessions (at least for the next year) into the Airstream at a campground in Ashland, we finally hit the road in the Airstream. Since the first leg of our trip is in the Northeast U.S., we decided to head the wrong direction and make Southwest Virginia our first stop. I grew up in SW Virginia and haven’t spent nearly enough time there in recent years, so I convinced Jamie and the kids to give it a shot.

I learned most of what I know in SW Virginia and, being a lifetime learner and all, I continued to learn on this first week in the Airstream. The first stop was at an Airstream-only park in Copper Hill in Floyd County up on Bent Mountain, the mountain I could see from my house growing up. They recommended skipping the mountain roads and taking the Blue Ridge Parkway – fine by me, I love the Parkway! So, we pull off onto the Parkway to find a gate and have to make a sharp u-turn to backtrack. Lesson #1 – making a sharp u-turn with a 28 foot trailer attached to your truck ain’t easy. Even the old standby, the 30 point turn, doesn’t work here. We eventually got turned around, so we got to see those old mountain roads anyway.

We make it up Bent Mountain. The Airstream park there is beautiful and full of beautiful RVs (can you tell we are biased?). We pull down the narrow road into the park, meet the host, and try to pull into our camping spot which requires a sharp 90 degree turn. I jackknife and force the Silver Baguette into her parking spot and feel pretty good about my backing skills (for now at least). We settle in, meet some other full-time Airstreamers, go for a quick hike to a nice waterfall, and hit Smith’s Grocery and Hardware to buy some chicken to grill for dinner. Lesson #2 – if a store is a combination grocery/hardware, they probably don’t have fresh produce. Either way, we spent a couple of days here, visited family, and had a great time. We wished we could stay longer.

For our next stop, we head to Blacksburg where I went to college. It was great getting to visit Virginia Tech again and see how it has grown. We camped down by the river at New River Junction along with my little brother, Keith. Tubing down the New was better than I remembered from back in college, though there was probably good reasons that I don’t remember the details of tubing back in college. We have to leave the New after a couple nights for our next step and we once again wished we were there longer. Lesson #3 – if you don’t have a job you need to get back to, there is no reason to be in such a hurry!

We hurry out the next morning, for no really good reason, to head off to Damascus – Trail Town USA. Damascus is an awesome little down where the Appalachian Trail literally runs down the street through town (and I literally know how to use the term literally). As I was parking the Airstream and hooking everything up, I realize that I lost a tool that allows us to hook the trailer back up to the hitch. I guess it is not really lost since I know it is sitting on the ground at the New RIver a couple hours away. Lesson #4 – overnight shipping to B.F.E. is expensive! I should have already learned this lesson as it is the second time I have had to order this tool in our one year of RV ownership. Oh well…

Damascus is a great town with outdoor adventure choices abound. Our first day there, we hiked up Mount Rogers, the highest point in Virginia. It is about a 9 mile hike with about 1,800 foot of elevation change. Lesson #5 – bribe your kids with Starbursts and they can probably climb Everest (thanks for the idea Simpson family!).

The next day we went biking on the Virginia Creeper Trail. A shuttle drops you at the top of a mountain, and you get to ride 17 miles all downhill back into Damascus.

After biking, we grabbed a beer at the Damascus Brewery and struck up a conversation with a guy at the bar, mostly at first because his beard made me jealous. He had through-hiked the AT partially a couple times and stopped once in Damascus because it looked like a great place to retire – he has been living there ever since. We talked about personal growth, why people do things like these trips, and why it may not make sense to not set a hard end date for a journey like this. He said that if we have not hiked to a place called the Channels, we had to go.

So, we spend our last day in Damascus hiking up Clinch Mountain to the Great Channels of Virginia. It is such a unique and awesome place where a maze of sandstone blocks was formed during the last ice age which makes you feel like you are in the slot canyons out west. It was well worth the hump up the mountain, even though we left the Starbursts in the truck. Lesson #6 – when a cool guy with a good beard at a brewery tells you a good place to hike, listen to him!

We got back that afternoon to the campground and met a couple that had sold their house and dropped out of the workforce to travel for a year with mountain bikes and canoes. We talked about our trips and he made a comment that I will take as Lesson #7 – this is so much better than waking up and going to work every day!

We left Damascus this morning, once again not heading Lesson #3, and headed up to Devil’s Backbone brewery in Nelson County. A campground at a brewery – oh yeah! As I am unhooking the trailer, I realize that two bars on the load distribution hitch are bent. Where the heck could that have happened? Oh yeah, Lesson #8 is that you can’t jackknife and force a trailer into a site like that one back in Copper Hill. Luckily I already know from Lesson #4 that overnight shipping on the parts to fix it is going to be expensive, so I am prepared. We met one of Jamie’s favorite people, Kim, at the brewery tonight and she gave me Lesson #9 – if you have a blog, use it more often. Thanks for the motivation, Kim!

Learning has never been so fun!