After having ditched the rain in Washington DC we arrived in Asheville. We didn’t actually want to cut Washington short, but the rain made us do it and now we had caught up on the extra day we “used” in New York City.

The Blue Ridge Parkway is, as I read somewhere, a 500 mile (800km) manicured stretch of road. The road follows the ridge of the mountains and from up there things really have a blue tint to them.

The roads are windy and we drove just about 70-100 miles (110-160 km) per day. The third day the fog and drizzling rain came back to us and in stretches we could not see much. The fourth day it was mostly foggy, with visibility down to 30 yards (30 meters) or so in places.

The Blue Ridge is also the home of Mountain Music, which they didn’t miss any opportunity to let us know. Mountain Music is a mixture of Irish, Scottish, German and African folk music. We ran into a few places where they played the music (ar oone of our campsites we had guitar and banjo playing neighbors), but I think the varieties we heard were a little too much inspired by German folk music for our taste. 😉

There are also some interesting sights on the way, like a restored river lock, a restored water mill, and a waterfall.

On the last day on the Blue Ridge we could not see much and abandoned operations and drove down from the ridge and in to Asheville, but before we did that we stopped at an apple orchard which was run as a preservation project to prevent it from being turned into real estate.

Felix got his chance to pick apples and munched, with great satisfaction, through two large apples while Sabine picked a small bag to take with us and I took a few pictures.

We had originally planned only to take some 350 miles (560 km) of the 500 mile long Parkway and stop at Asheville. We still ended up doing that and after a full service campground, with a somewhat strangely confused campground owner, we strolled downtown Ashville for the day – before heading to Charleston at the coast.