Shenandoah National Park: Day One

That quote was on one of the signs we saw yesterday during our first day at the national park. We got very lucky with the weather. There was a small chance of rain, and a small bit of rain was what we got. Mainly, we were happy for a little bit of sunshine and no fog.

Before we left the RV, I finished off the last of Thelma. I think I may have set a new personal land-based speed record on her...six days from start to finish.

Since I had the iron out, I got the next (and last) bag lady ready to go...meet Earlene. I'll get started on her December 1st, or whenever I hear the first Christmas Carol...whichever comes second.

Interestingly, the pattern cover shows her with sunglasses, but you can see that the drawing has her with eyes. Hm...which do you like better? She's the only bag lady to wear sunglasses, if I decide to do her that way.

By all rights I should head back to the center block for the Sundress quilt, which is only about 2/3 finished. I'm kind of tired of working on it, however, since I started on it when we first started the trip. I'm thinking I'll put it in the rotation with the rest of my projects for now and work on the next Wine Country block...this one.

These are fairly small, and so it'll stitch up pretty quick too. Then, I'm excited to get started on the Snow Globes project...seems like a good one to be working on for the season, doesn't it? I swiped this image off the Crabapple Hill Studios website (or maybe it was the pattern cover). It's a little blown out, so I hope you can see it.

It has the prettiest sparkly floss to work with, and it comes in several different colors. I'll admit I've been wanting to start it for a long time.

So anyway...back to yesterday's comings and goings. We left the kitties in their usual morning napping positions. They're always so tired after a night of keeping us awake.

Actually, they've settled in and been really good this trip.

And I made good on my threat to take a picture of Yogi Bear at the park's entrance. I'm telling you, it doesn't get any better than this. I've wanted to meet Yogi Bear since I was about three years old.

From the park, it's a pretty quick trip up to the entrance to the national park. Soon after, we passed through the dreaded tunnel that caused us so much angst the day before. Mike and I both swear we could have made it through. As an arched tunnel, the center was plenty high enough for us to clear it. The problem would have been oncoming traffic since we would have needed to travel down the middle of the road.

At that length, we would have needed to station someone at the far end to prevent any oncoming cars from entering the tunnel...and, well...I don't know if the park rangers would have been happy with us. It's just as well...we're happy where we are. Coming out the other side, we looked back to see this tree.

There was an overlook just past the tunnel, and wow! Gorgeous fall color on the hillside. I think our timing here was perfect.

All the lookouts on yesterday's journey gave us expansive views of the valley below, and it was incredibly beautiful.

I'll probably wear you out with pictures of fall colors, but we never got tired of looking at them.

I'm afraid my pictures didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. The sky was very bright, and so it's blown out in most of them. I was shooting with my Nikon point and shoot, which I love. It takes really good pictures, and I love its compact size and light weight.

For some photography, however, a DSLR is really the way to go for any number of reasons. For yesterday's photography, it would have been nice to have a filter that would have darkened the sky a little bit.

As we traveled through the park along Skyline Drive, a young buck white-tailed deer ran across the road in front of us.

On the other side of the ridge, we could really get a sense of the rippled landscape and the many layers of color.

Also, the little towns in the valley below on the west side of the mountain.

Mike pointed out the red barns below, and I noticed I could catch the church steeple and the barns all in the same image if I zoomed in real close. It's a little like being a photographic peeping Tom.

Backing up just a little, it looked like this:

The canopy of leaves overhead was lovely as well. Most of the leaves are yellow to bronze in color with a few reds sprinkled in.

At this overlook, just enough of the trees had lost their leaves to give the illusion of a fine mist in amongst the remaining colorful leaves.

We checked out the campground at Big Meadows. We've paid for three nights here at Yogi Bear, and we're considering staying another couple of days to extend our stay out into the best of the weather. We thought we might pull the RV up to Big Meadows using one of the southern entrances and spend our additional days there. Then, the ranger discouraged us when she said there could be snow on Thursday night. If we decide to stay longer, we'll stick where we are right now.

After that, we stopped off at the Visitor's Center to pick up a hiking book. We plan to do some hiking. Also, I picked up a new National Parks book and a Scenic Highways & Byways book. Ours are both several editions old, and we've realized that some of the newer parks are not listed in our older books.

From there, we headed down the mountain and into those picturesque towns we saw from above. They were so pretty on this nice day. Mike was really impressed with the beauty and said he could consider living here...not that we would ever leave Oregon. (By the way, he said that about Maine and Florida too on previous trips.) We saw quite a few barns.

This one is back close to our RV park.

As we were pulling back up to the trailer, I noticed this tree in the RV park, ablaze in the sunshine.

I walked over to get a closer look. At my feet, it looked like this.

We get fall color in Oregon, but it's usually short-lived. We tend to get high winds at the beginning of October, and so whatever fall color appears usually gets blown off the trees before we have much time to enjoy it.

Like I said, I took a lot of pictures.

Since we're here in Jellystone, I thought you'd want to know that we're parked at the Corner of Woodland Way and Picnic Pike.

Cindy Bear Drive goes right alongside us. It's a nice park, especially for families. There are lots of activities for young and old alike here. We could have rented a golf cart to get around this large park, but I declined at check in. Mike is rather disappointed about that. There are also cabins here, and so even if you're not an RVer, it's a good place to call home during a visit to Shenandoah National Park.

We're expecting bad weather today, although it hasn't started raining as I'm writing this. Depending on what the weather does, we'll either head back up to the park and drive north, or we might stay here and put off any more visiting until tomorrow. We're expecting nicer weather toward the end of the week, and we want to get out and do some hiking before moving on.