Is there anything much more American than a drive-through National Park?

Shenandoah wasn’t the only such park we visited on our American road trip, but it was the first. The easiest way to see it is to take the Skyline Drive, a scenic road sat on the crest of the Blue Ridge mountain range, stretching across the state of Virginia. We decided to save the more famous Blue Ridge Parkway, a nearby (and much longer) route, for a future trip!

This place is gorgeous, as well as convenient. Given that we could only afford to spend a day here (the clock was ticking on our 90 days in the US!) it was amazingly helpful to be able to cross it so easily.

There are plenty of trails to hike here, if you so wish (and if you’ve got more time than we had). The famed Appalachian Trail runs through Shenandoah, and sure enough, we saw a few exhausted and harrowed-looking hikers plodding around, with those yellow “AT” labels on their backpacks. Kudos to them!

Easily one of the most stunning drives of our trip so far, we swerved around the hilltops with ease, stopping every so often at one of the many, many viewpoints along the road.

As we took one of the corners, we saw a statue of a bear on the kerb. Except it wasn’t a statue. It was a real bear, just watching us whizz right past. I wish we could show you a picture of this but we were too in shock to whip the camera out in time! Instead, here’s a (very blurry) snap of another bear we saw later on:

You’d think you’d get tired of staring at hills…

… but we didn’t!

A wonderful day of beautiful scenery almost behind us, we stopped to watch the sunset at the last viewpoint of the Skyline Drive, where we got lost in conversation for hours with a friendly local named Paul. Having completely lost track of time, we made a beeline for Washington DC, our spot for the next day!