The voyage south has had it's moments.
Our first stop below the Mason-Dixon line was Endless Caverns RV Campground. As campgrounds go, it's a pretty good one with gravel roads and sites terraced on a hillside. They've got a bounce pad and playground that Jace would love had he been traveling with us, golf carts for rent, and a nice set of walking trails . Their pool had already been shut down for the season (bummer!), like so many others on the latter part of this trip.
They also had the Endless Cavern tour right on-site.
Now, we had brought the daughters to Luray Caverns years ago, taken Jace through the caverns containing Ruby Falls, and of course Barbara and I had done the mother of all cavern tours when we visited Carlsbad Caverns on our first westward swing in the motor home years ago, so you'd have to be pretty special to impress us with a cave tour.
Endless Caverns does NOT impress.
The tour starts off with endless warnings about not touching anything underground – walls, ceilings, no walking through puddles of water – and I get it; those warnings are there to protect the caverns from surface damage caused by skin oils and the like. The problem comes in when you're trying to maneuver your way through the caverns via a floor worn slick from endless footsteps and sometimes on a thin rug covered in endless cave dust so as to make footing treacherous. With almost no handrails for support except in a few areas with stairs or steeper slopes.
In short, due to the need to keep your eyes on your footing, you end up missing many of the lighted displays set up for the tour itself.
We hated it. Not at all worth the $25 per person cavern tour fee.
Heading out for a rendezvous with my brother Doug and sister-in-law Tracey in North Carolina, we had to take the motor home over the Blue Ridge mountains. Now understand, I have a GPS program on my iPad that was developed for truckers and modified for the RV world, and with few exceptions has provided exemplary directions for more than 7 years and 66,000 RV miles. I have parameters set for “prefer highways” which means interstates, state parkways and state (numbered) roads.
But state roads in Virginia, while technically safe for truck and RV traffic, are merely local 2-lane roads working their way through isolated small towns on your way to and from destinations.
So we find ourselves on a road boasting a 12% uphill grade and 5 or 6 “switchbacks” used to get up the mountain, meaning I'm reefing this 52-foot motor home / Jeep combination through extremely tight turns that limit cars to 15 miles per hour, and praying that no one is coming down the mountain the other way who needs the same amount of room I need on the switchbacks in order to go up!
And frankly, I'm lucky to be hitting 10 miles per hour, not that I'd want to go faster even if I could.
The way down is the same 12% grade, but at least it's without switchbacks, so I've got the RV in 2nd gear and pumping my brakes to keep my front tires from exceeding their 155 degree temperature maximums.
They hit 144 degrees at their hottest.
I had hoped to include some video of that part of the drive, but our dash cam was misbehaving.
Our drive day ended at Paradise Lake and Campground on the Virginia border with North Carolina; a cute little resort with many permanent residents but one pass-through site ready for us to quickly pull in without having to disconnect the Jeep – much needed at the end of that particular drive!
Next up was one of our favorite RV pastimes – Cracker-docking at a Cracker Barrel. For this trip, it's how you meet with your brother and sister-in-law who live in Arizona without the 2,200 mile drive on I-10. They had been visiting a nephew in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina and had time enough to meet us for breakfast. Cracker Barrel hardly ever disappoints, especially since they let us park our rig away from their buildings for a free overnight stay.
It's been almost 2 ½ years since we last saw each other after our Dad passed away, so even a short family fix was much needed.
But there's till a few miles and drive days to go before we finish up the Great End of Summer Road Trip, and our next installment will highlight one of the all-too-prevalent safety problems on the road today.
But you'll have to wait to find out what it is in the next Parental Parolees!
