Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #12
Afton, VA - Tue, 3 Sep 2024. 4:15pm

I've mentioned the Skyline Drive in my past few blogs. I should describe what it actually is, for those who don't know. The Skyline Drive is a mountaintop road that traces 105 miles through the length of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. In the north the road starts in Front Royal, VA at highway US-340 a few miles from the junction of I-66 and I-81. In the south it ends in the tiny town of Afton, VA at highway US-250 near the junction with I-64. It traces along the ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, generally above 3,000' elevation though it dips lower at a few passes it crosses.

Today we drove the Skyline Drive from its southern end, above the cities of Waynesboro and Charlottesville, about 25 miles north to the trailhead for Doyles River Falls.



The Skyline Drive isn't just a route to get from Point A to Point B, though it does serve that purpose, too. Along its length are some 75 scenic overlooks where motorists can stop to enjoy the vistas. We didn't do much of that on our trip today, as we have a fairly full itinerary with a big hike earlier today and a long drive ahead of us to our next stop in North Carolina tonight. But just driving the road, which itself is scenic with its old-timey construction from the 1930s and the Civilian Conservation Corps, and stopping at lots of the scenic pullouts, can be a vacation in and of itself. I know because that's the first vacation I ever remember having!

I think I was about 8 years old at the time, though I could have been 7 or 9. It was the first actual vacation I remember my parents taking with my younger sister and me. Actual, meaning we didn't just go visit my grandparents' house for a week or a weekend. We stayed at a hotels. Just visiting a hotel was a new experience, and splashing around in the Howard Johnson's kid-friendly swimming pool was practically a vacation unto itself, but on that trip we also drove a good bit of the Skyline Drive out and back. I'd never seen mountains before. Mountains were amazing. That first vacation kindled my interest in the great outdoors, and mountains in particular, something that's never left me in over 40 years since.

My family returned to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Skyline Drive a few more times during my childhood. The memories are almost all positive. One, though, is bittersweet. I was reminded of that one today, too.

A Bittersweet Stop on Memory Lane

At the southern end of the Skyline Drive, near Interstate 64, is a hotel on a hilltop. Once upon a time it was a Howard Johnson's hotel. We stayed at a lot of HoJo's hotels (as they were casually known) back in the day. They were family friendly, had a decent standard of quality, and always had a HoJo's restaurant attached, which was also very family friendly.

Today the hotel stands empty and abandoned. I'm not sure what happened here, as it seems like a good place for a hotel. The HoJo's brand did run into difficulties years ago. Part of my childhood experience with them was seeing their quality start to slide downhill. Their once ubiquitous restaurants, with the orange and teal roofs, started to close down.



What's bittersweet is not just that the HoJo's chain deteriorated and closed, or that this particular HoJo hotel and restaurant are long abandoned and overgrown with weeds. It's also that my memories of staying here are mixed.

We stayed here at part of a short vacation my parents took us on at the last minute. Vacations of any kind were rare enough in my family growing up. This one was also spontaneous. Like, my parents decided on a Friday, "Let's take the kids and go to the mountains this weekend." My parents were never spontaneous.

Car Trouble (Almost 40 Years Ago)

Things were going well on the trip. We checked in to the hotel on top of the hill then drove back down for a meal at the HoJo's restaurant (the one now overgrown) below. But as we piled back into the car after lunch to drive up the hill, the car couldn't make it. It lost power on the hill, and my dad carefully reversed it back to the parking lot.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and in this small town there was no place to get a car fixed until Monday. Actually there was no place to get this car fixed anytime in this small town. The closest shop was down the mountain in Waynesboro. And they weren't open until Monday. So we had a longer-than-planned stay at this mountaintop hotel.

As a kid, the stay was great. Swimming in the pool was fun, having an extra day was fun. Eating dinner at the steakhouse in the hotel was fun— we didn't eat every meal at HoJo's restaurant— especially laughing to myself about why the restaurant found it necessary to post signs on every wall inside telling patrons, "DO NOT ORDER STEAK 'WELL DONE'". Like, that's their usual clientele: braying jackasses who think bellowing, "And make it WELL DONE!!" when ordering a steak shows what sophisticated customers they are. Stay classy, small town America.

As a kid, it was good times. But I wasn't just a kid. I was a teen. I was mature enough to think about situations from other people's perspective. From my parents' perspective this had to be worrisome. Were the kids going to be okay here? How long would it take to get the car fixed? Would my dad miss more than one unexpected day of work? And how much would this all cost? Not just the car repairs, but also the extra hotel night and all the dining out. Money was tight for my parents. That's why our vacations were few and simple compared to many of my schoolmates' families, and why spontaneity wasn't really a thing for us.

The good thing with this star-crossed trip is that the car got fixed quickly on Monday morning. The cost wasn't huge though it was certainly a lot for my parents' already strained budget. And we kids had a good time hanging out at the hotel's pool for an extra day.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #10
Afton, VA - Tue, 3 Sep 2024. 1:30pm

Today we've driven up to the Skyline Drive northwest of Charlottesville, VA. We're not here just to drive the Drive, though that is a worthy thing to do on a pleasant late-summer day. We're going hiking on the Doyles River Falls trail in Shenandoah National Park.

Because the Skyline Drive roughly traces the crest of the Blue Ridge mountains, many of the hikes from up there are "upside down". Meaning, we hike down on the way in... and up on the way back. Years ago an outdoors writer quipped it's like going on vacation on your credit card. You pay when you return.

Indeed the first part of this trail was down, down, down... and not just down but steeply down. In the first 10 minutes we'd already descended 300 feet. I figure it's going to take a lot longer than 10 minutes to climb that last leg of the trail on the way out.

Well below that point, more like 800 feet down from the start, we reached the first of three waterfalls.



This is the smallest waterfall of the three and is unnamed. I'd say it's a nice little reward for the energy we'd expended, an appetizer for the main course, except that we haven't really expended any energy yet. I mean, hiking downhill is tough in its own way—tough mostly on knees and toes— but it's not the cardio workout that climbing back up will be.



Not far below the unnamed falls is Upper Doyles River Falls. Yeah, the people responsible for naming things here were really phoning it in. They went from an unnamed falls to an uninspiringly named falls. But hey, it's a double falls. Yes, both the lower and upper halves are Upper Doyle River Falls. Uninspired.



Someone was already splashing around beneath the lower falls with their dogs, so we scrambled up the rocks on one side to get to the base of the upper tier.

It was nice here, so we stayed for a while. I'd say we were resting our aching muscles, but again, our hard work was yet to come.



As other people arrived we swapped places to the lower tier of falls so someone else could enjoy the upper tier.



Of course, from below the lower half we can still enjoy (as in, see) both halves.

Soon enough it was time to continue downhill. Lower Doyles River Falls awaits!

Keep reading: Lower Doyles Falls & back to the top!