This entry will cover a fair amount of ground, beginning with our travels from Warm Springs to spending a night in Staunton (called “Stanton” locally), traveling up onto Skyline Drive, spending the night at Big Meadow, and finally arriving to spend a night in Berryville with Polly and John Crawford and awakening in the morning to 2″ of wet snow on the ground!
We wound our way from Warm Springs up to Staunton via Monterey and McDowell. McDowell is home to the Sugar Tree Country Store where we stopped and came away with some fun items for the grandkids and a very pleasant talk with the proprietor.
At Monterey, we saw that West Virginia was seven miles up the road so we went up to cross the state line to add another state to the roster.
Staunton: we went into the Visitor Center to find out what was available for housing and were quickly installed in the Stonewall Jackson Hotel and Convention Center, which is far more charming than it sounds. Comfortable rooms, wonderful staff and right next to the Blackfriars Theater, where the American Shakespeare Company and others put on plays. We hustled over to see if we could get a seat the same night and were rewarded: a fabulous interpretation of The Tempest, there in Staunton VA; who knew?
Staunton is a delightful town. It has a huge public park, an Amtrak station, a good spread of restaurants and shops, a couple of small colleges and a lovely old downtown which is being well looked after and upgraded. We enjoyed it thoroughly.
The next morning we headed up the hill towards the Skyline Drive. We used our Senior Pass for the first time to get into Shenandoah National Park for free, and wound our way along the crests towards Big Meadow Lodge where we were to spend the night. It turned out to be a little after the peak color season so we had the road very much to ourselves, picnic-ed in a deserted picnic ground (even the bears had left as there were no more soft touches to be found cooking lunch for them. One of the wonderful features of the drive was the huge variety of trees to be seen not only along the road, but out on the ridges and hills and down into the valleys; you could see by the patches of color that it is a wonderfully mixed deciduous forest, full of trees which we do not know at all – very frustrating not to be able to identify a third of the trees we were seeing.
Big Meadow Lodge is a classic piece of National Park lodging: dark wood, little cabins, the central lodge with a view west over the Shenandoah and a fire going in the big fireplace. Our room was cosy, clean, comfortable and came with a full selection of deer all around the buildings.
We went over to the Visitor Center the next morning to see if Dan could talk to one of the Student Conservation Association volunteers. SCA (for which Dan worked for 10 years) provides volunteer college students who work in practically every aspect of the services and jobs of the principal Federal Land Management agencies (USNPS, USFS, BLM, USFWS) as well as many state park systems and other private management agencies like The Nature Conservancy. Dan used to oversee all those positions, and never having been to Shenandoah, was curious to talk to the SCA volunteer there. He was a recent college graduate, Philosophy and English, and having a great time and hoping to be able to find a way to develop the opportunity, even in the face of continuous federal and state budget cuts for such “unimportant” things as national parks and forests. A high percentage of these volunteers end up with professional career positions with one of the federal and state resource management agencies.
Under increasingly grey skies the next day (Friday, 28 October), we drove the northern miles of the Drive, and came down from 3000 feet to the plains at Front Royal, and headed on towards Berryville, home of Polly and John Crawford, friends from Small Point, Maine.
Both of them grew up in and around Winchester and were willing to take in two strays for two nights and let us do our laundry.
This morning we woke to an inch of wet snow on the ground, with more coming down by the minute, and with the sound of tree branches snapping and crashing all around the house. Heavy wet snow, with the leaves still on the trees, is a recipe for power outages, cars in ditches and in general a good time to put your feet up in front of the fire with a good book.
John’s 4-wheel drive enabled Polly and John to give us a wonderful tour of the places where they grew up and ended up taking us into the Museum of the Shenandoah in Winchester.
This is an excellent museum, with very well done displays of the cultural history of the area and a painting gallery full of little treasures, with two Gilbert Stuart portraits, and others by Constable, Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Guardi and several others; a wonderful treat in an unexpected place.
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