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Arriving at: Mathews Arm Campground Shenandoah National Park, Rileyville, VA |
TRAVEL DAY - 123 miles
PATAPSCO VALLEY STATE PARKto
MATHEWS ARM CAMPGROUND
Today after we broke camp, but before we started heading for our new home, we had some very important business to take care of. THE POD needed a bath! Earlier in the week when we were doing laundry I scoped out a do-it-yourself car wash that was next door. It had several large bays, big enough to fit THE POD, so we decided it was time to give the Airstream a bath. We did a little touch up cleaning on ROVER's wheels and the moved THE POD into position. All in all it took us just over a hour to get them looking almost new again.
Today's trip was different than most because we pretty much stayed on the Interstate Highways the whole way. With the mountains and elevation changes we were going to have to negotiate I wanted to stay off the little twisty turning roads that we usually take. It turns out that it worked out well for a rookie mountain driver like myself. Pretty much no steep grades up or down and no sharp turns. That is until we got inside of Shenandoah National Park.
Once inside the park it was all uphill. The speed limit is 35 MPH inside the park and most of the time I was having to keep my speed to around 25 MPH so I felt like I was still in control of the vehicle. Our campground is 22 miles from the north entrance gate in the town of Front Royal. There are a dozen or so pull-outs with wide sweeping vista views in this first 22 miles and we stopped in at least half of them, to let faster cars and motorcycles pass us.
Once inside the campground we located the site that we reserved 6 months ago. It was not going to work out for us, no cell signal and very unlevel. Fortunately only about a third of this campground's sites are reservable, the other two thirds are first come first served. One advantage of arriving on a Thursday is the park is almost empty and we could change our site to any one of the first come first serve sites, which is what we did. We now have a larger, more private site and there is even usable cell signal so we can get some work done.
Some of you may have noticed that for about 20 miles of today's route we passed into and out of the state of West Virginia. We don't count a state as visited unless we spend the night there. So you won't see it marked on our Visited States Map at the very bottom of this page, not until next year at least!
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