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I had heard good things about the Outer Banks of North Carolina, so that area was on my list of places to visit eventually. No one came up with other ideas, so we went to the Outer Banks (AKA OBX).

Plus I wanted to get there before the ocean levels rise and wipe out coastal touristy areas.

Day 1:
We drove. All day. Made it to Virginia.

Then it was evening, then morning, the next day.

Day 2:
We took a break from a lot of driving and did some hiking.

Our first activity was a cave tour. We have toured a number of caves and I don’t know that I would have been that excited about this one, but they do have the world’s largest musical instrument – the Stalacpipe Organ.

Much of the cave was the typical cave stuff, but it was a self-guided tour so we didn’t get the turn-off-all-the-lights bit.

This formation was called Curtains:

This formation was called Fish Market, which makes sense when you look at it:

And then you have Mirror Lake:

And then there’s the star of the show – the Stalacpipe Organ:

It is billed as the world’s largest musical organ, because the organ uses the actual stalactites as the instrument. The keys of the organ activate hammers that strike different-length stalactites instead of directing air into different-length tubes like a normal pipe organ.

And they have demonstrations, they have it play something occasionally. We did get to hear it while we were there. It was okay sounding, but a little hard to discern some notes. When the song was done, they announced that it had played “A Mightly Fortress”, the classic hymn. But I did not recognize it while it was playing. Maybe if they told us the song before it played, I might have been able to pick it out a little better.

The cave is part of a general tourist trap, so after taking the cave tour we went next door to the car museum. It wasn’t a huge place, but they had a nice collection of older vehicles. Starting before gas-powered cars, like this surrey with the fringe on the top.

And they had a bunch of cars from the 1910s-1930s. I could have stayed there longer and read more of the placards, but the family had already gone through quickly and were waiting for me at the end.

There were some other shops in the conglomeration of things there, like a fudge shop and something else, but it was approaching lunch time and we had a picnic to get to.

So we left the touristy area and we hopped on over to the Appalachian Trail. Specifically, Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park, which parallels/combines with the AT for much of its length.

We had a picnic lunch at a trailhead picnic area, then we headed off to our hike. The main thing to know about stopping at trailheads or waterfalls along Skyline Drive is there is not much parking. Or rather, the parking is not where you need it. If you’re going to a place that is at least mildly popular, you need a backup plan for parking.

Our first stop was Little Stony Man. The trailhead parking lot was full, with cars parked half on the shoulder leading up to it because they couldn’t fit. So I drove back, probably less than half a mile, to the previous parking lot. Since the AT goes along Skyline Drive, all we had to do was walk to the back of the big parking lot, hop on the AT, and walk a quarter mile or so to the Little Stony Man trail.

We hiked up to the lookout, it was an out-and-back trail. It has some nice views. There’s an upper part and a lower part. Here’s a view of the lower part from the upper part.

Here’s the view in general:

Then back in the car and off to the next stop – Dark Hollow Falls.

DHF is one of the most popular stops in the park, so I was prepared for a plan B should the parking at the trailhead be full. Which it was, and there were people parking along the shoulder because they couldn’t find a spot in that lot. But if you drove about 10 seconds more you arrived at the parking lot for the visitor’s center and could just walk a trail for a quarter-mile from there to get to the trailhead for DHF. Plenty of parking at the visitor’s center, plus real bathrooms.

The walk from the visitor’s center to the trailhead was peaceful and sparsely populated.

The walk on the DHF trail was more fully populated, and the falls themselves were also pretty crowded.

That was it for Shenandoah National Park, and we drove for a bit over to Richmond for our hotel.

Then it was evening, then morning, the next day.

Day 3:
This was a day of half driving and half sight-seeing. We drove from Richmond to just south of Norfolk. This was where we stopped for lunch and a hike.

This was not in my original plan, but when Some Wife mentioned we would be going near the Great Dismal Swamp, I couldn’t pass it up.

We had lunch at the parking lot and then walked over the bridge over the canal.

The GDS is very large and there are various places to visit. We went to the state park part of it, so there was a boardwalk and a visitor center. Here’s the boardwalk:

And here is what the swamp itself looks like. There were not a lot of bugs, nor rodents of unusual size.

Then it was back on the road and off to Kitty Hawk.

To be continued…

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