Two Weeks Exploring the Blue Ridge Parkway

In continuing our summer van adventure, we departed our Harvest Hosts stay in South Carolina and made our way to provision for our next adventure.

We had decided to hop on the Blue Ridge Parkway and follow it north. The cooler temperatures, a slow meandering pace, scenic views and more seclusion called us.

While we’ve done smaller portions of the Parkway before in years past – we wanted an extended slow roll this time around.

Note, this post is focused on our trip on the parkway from July 25 to August 6. But we got a lot of questions on RVing the parkway, so we also have a specific post focused on Tips for RVing the Blue Ridge Parkway

First, the video telling of this tale:

What is the Blue Ridge Parkway?

The Blue Ridge Parkway is a unique part of the National Park system that links the Great Smokey Mountain National Park to the Shenandoah National Park.

Conceived during the Great Depression as a New Deal project to put people to work, this is an epic 469 mile meandering drive through the Appalachian Mountains. It wasn’t actually fully completed until the 1980s.

It serves to protect the land and countryside in this area of the country. Open only to recreational traffic, you’ll find no stoplights, no billboards and no commercial activity. The only buildings visible are those vintage structures that were preserved and purchased when the Parkway was initially built.

And there are just a few official concessionaires along the way offering lodging, food, visitor centers and campgrounds.

There are over 200 ways to enter the parkway in Virginia and North Carolina – so there are no entrance fees to explore this national treasure.

Every inch of the parkway was architected to flow with the landscape – offering non-stop amazing views. It’s truly art, and some of the most relaxing driving at a max of 45 mph and little traffic (after you get over the general concept of steep inclines, sharp curves, tunnels and lack of shoulders.)

We think driving the Parkway is an experience everyone should strive to have, even if you can only get in a smaller section of it.

Along the parkway, there are 8 official campgrounds that can accommodate tents and smaller RVs, with only a few spots here and there suitable for larger RVs. There are no hook-ups, but water and dump stations are provided – as well as flush toilets (two campgrounds have showers). Each is $20/night with a mix of reservable and first-come first-serve sites.

We’ll be following up with some more detailed tips on RVing the parkway in a future post, but suffice it to say with low tunnels, sharp turns and limited availability of large campsites – this is adventure best for smaller RVs (perhaps 30′ being the max we’d recommend.. smaller even better).

We wouldn’t even dream of attempting this in our 35′ vintage bus, but it’s PERFECT for our van. So let’s go!

Stop 1: Mount Pisgah Campground

For our first stop, we would be rendezvousing with dear friends Jen & Deas Nealy at the campground closest to their home in Asheville, NC. They also own a Travato (see our post comparing their KL floorplan to our GL).

Because of this stop and our timing, we opted to skip entering the parkway at the official southern start, and instead stopped in Brevard, NC for a quick provisioning and came up through the Cradle of Forestry.

The Mount Pisgah campground is gorgeous, but it is difficult to find level sites – a trend we would find is the norm for up here in the mountains.

We were each able to snag first-come-first-serve sites near each other, in the one corner of the campground that got decent cellular signal on Verizon and AT&T.

We enjoyed some hiking together and evening overlooks at the lodge across the street. But for our full day together, it rained non-stop keeping us in our respective vans mostly.

During our time together, we needed to host a webinar for our members at the Mobile Internet Resource Center (Jen also happens to work with us) – so we all retreated back to their place in Asheville for better bandwidth and drier hanging out.

Stop 2: Crabtree Falls

After our side departure to Asheville, we got back on the parkway and continued northward to the next campground. But first we made a side trip to Mount Mitchell State Park, which is the highest point east of the Mississippi. Thankfully, you can drive almost to the top, and only walk the remainder of the summit.

Crabtree Falls is the next campground on the map and we were able to snag a reservable site that wasn’t reserved for a couple nights that had decent privacy. Most the sites in this campground weren’t overly appealing otherwise to us.

Unfortunately, we seemed to have attracted neighbors who were heavily generator dependent. On the first day, our neighbors ran theirs pretty much non-stop from 8am – 9pm (the posted generator hours). When they left in the morning, we thought we might be in the clear and renewed for another night – only to have a new neighbor show up with a very loud contractor generator.

Thankfully we were able to squeeze in enough quiet moments to film some work related videos, and we had decent bandwidth to get some work done. The rest of the time, we went out hiking, and enjoyed the gorgeous falls.

Stop 3: Linville Falls Campground

The weekend was upon us, and we had hopes to find a decent site and perhaps some connectivity seeing that this next stop was near a town. But wrong we were. We were able to get an ok site last minute (not many great ones in this campground), but we couldn’t get enough signal to do much more than some occasional text based online stuff.

We enjoyed a hike to the falls here – which are a mile from the campground with no dedicated hiking trail. And we got out the Phase 10 playing cards to keep ourselves entertained in an otherwise busy feeling weekend campground.

Stop 4: Thistle Meadow Winery

The next official campground on the parkway would be Julian Price, which is supposed to be quite nice. But with it being a Saturday evening and seeing how much traffic was in the non-campground areas along this stretch – we opted to skip. We also knew connectivity wasn’t possible here at all.

Instead, we called ahead to a Harvest Hosts in Laurel Springs – not too far off the route. Thankfully they had an opening last minute, so we headed that way. It was nice to escape full feeling campgrounds, and enjoy a peaceful evening along a babbling brook with some very nice wine.

This was the picture perfect stay!

Stop 5: Doughton Park Campground

We could find no reviews on this campground, so had no idea what to expect.

There are two entrances to the campground from the parkway – one marked Tent, Vans & Pop-ups and the other RVs.  So we pulled into the van loop, only to be told the signs were made in the 1950s, and our 21′ van is considered an RV in this campground. So we turned around and were delighted with the RV loop – nice spacious flat sites!

And we scored with a sweet reservable pull through site with two nights open on it.

And get this, AT&T had fabulous signal and we were getting over 200 Mbps!  Yeah, sign us up for this one!

There’s a hiking trail that cuts through the campground – go north and you can visit an old cabin with some ranger led programs.

And go south you can visit the newly re-opened The Bluffs classic diner. Since it was my birthday week, we splurged on dinner at opening time before any crowds. We were reassured that inside all federal buildings masks are required too – and the pecan crusted trout was AMAZING.

All and all, a fabulous stop.

Stop 6: Rocky Knob Campground

We arrived to Rocky Knob Campground, and it was pretty much empty – and we had our pick of sites. We selected one of the few sites that was flat, and settled in for the evening after enjoying a hike through the cows across the way to the top of the Knob.

Really not too much remarkable here, but just a nice pleasant stay.

Up ahead, the parkway detours into Roanoke due to some bridge repairs, which we used as an opportunity to restock the fridge. We then found our way to the official Blue Ridge Parkway visitors center at Explore Park, where they have a little 6-site RV campground with hook-ups that is privately run. We indulged in some long hot showers in the immaculate bath suites, and enjoyed some biking around this strange park that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.

Stop 7: Peaks of Otter Campground

Quite honestly, after driving through the first couple of loops of this campground – we almost bailed. There was no cellular signal to be found, and most of the sites were quite unlevel or facing the wrong way to back into.

That was until we turned the corner and found site T18 – which was level and private. And got just enough of a whiff of signal for us to get online.  We pulled right in and called it ours.

There’s a lot to do at this stop, especially if you like steep incline hiking – there are two trails that take you to the peaks of the otters (otters apparently means mountains).

We however were thrilled that Abbot Lake offers a nice flat 1-mile trail around it, and it was only about 400′ descent to get there from the campground. By this point, we had done plenty of mountain hiking and our legs were feeling it.

Final Stop: Otter Creek Campground

This campground we had actually been to before, long ago, in our Oliver Travel Trailer. In fact, the person who purchased our trailer we actually met at this campground nearly 10 years ago.

We were able to snag a first come first serve creekside van-sized site – and then took the bikes on the parkway to explore the visitor’s area at the water gap. There’s an old lock there and a trail of trees.

We were also quite surprised to meet some fans who actually live in Sanford (where we spent the past year on the boat) who were also out exploring the Parkway! We had an enjoyable evening hanging out.

Wrapping Up the Parkway

In writing this, it sounds like the Blue Ridge Parkway is a bunch of stops with campgrounds with unlevel sites and poor cellular signal. And that doesn’t sound like too much fun, does it?

But it’s so much more.

It’s hundreds of miles of unending scenic views along a roadway built with one purpose – the art of driving.

There are over 200 overlooks along the way, each worth stopping at. The campgrounds are just convenient spots to stop so you don’t have to rush.

We loved the pace of driving an hour or two between campgrounds soaking up the views. The stops were perfect to break things up to keep the driving feeling fresh and amazing. And it was just enough time for our Travato’s Volta Power system to charge itself up to have full batteries.

And the campgrounds were quite pleasant – except for those pesky crowded weekends, and occasional RVs not setup to be as electrically independent.

We loved spending two weeks meandering along the parkway, and kinda wish we had more time to spread it out even more.

And speaking of connectivity, we actually turned this trip into a case study – our members at the Mobile Internet Resource Center can read a stop-by-stop account of what worked in each location for us to get online (or not). We were able to get suitably online at all but one stop – and the method was different at each time. Just reinforcing the importance of having a mobile internet arsenal with redundant options to try!

Real Time Catch-Up

We are falling behind in keeping these posts up to date. Being back on the move has been fabulous, but moving every night or two is getting exhausting. We’re relearning the need for balance if we’re going to work, explore, drive, share and enjoy.

We’re actually writing this from the White Mountains of New Hampshire, having just evacuated from Connecticut and Rhode Island from a hurricane last week – crazy after heading up this way to escape hurricane season!

We’re enjoying a rare down day that isn’t filled with driving time or work projects. And speaking of which, I’m going to cut this blog here so that we can get back to some much needed relaxing.

We’ll soon be turning the wheels west, with an aim to get to the St. Louis area in a few weeks to spend time with Chris’ family before they head south for the winter. We’re looking forward to some extended time in a house.. with long showers.

We’ll do our best to get a post up with some RV specific tips for the Blue Ridge Parkway soon, and then get you caught up on the adventures from there.

Maybe, someday.