NC Mountains 2014 - Days 23 & 24

Day 23 - Saturday 8/30/14 It rained during the night so the air was nice and crisp this morning for our walk. After breakfast I walked the trail from the campground through the woods over to the Brinegar Cabin. The two room cabin with loft was built about 1880 and used until the 1930’s. The homestead included the cabin, spring house, shed and garden. A ranger was onsite today discussing mountain life and also demonstrating spinning sheep wool. My hike was 3 miles roundtrip, even though the sign at the campground showed it a 1.0 mile trip each way. We relaxed and did some reading for the remainder of the day. The ranger stopped to say hello in the afternoon and I asked her to identify a tree on our site. It was a Tulip Popular and drops a seed pod full of bright orange seeds. I am talking some home to see if I get them to sprout. Then we discussed the need to have a bathhouse for the park campground, especially for the tent loops. She said they got a new superintendent last October and he was looking for suggestions to improve the park. She also said that the park service was thinking about closing Doughton Park last year until the new superintendent came on the job and he was able to keep it open. She said she had more campers this weekend that she normally has. Most of the sites were used all weekend. It would be a shame to close this park.

Day 24 - Sunday 8/31/14 It rained again this morning until about 8AM and was really foggy until 9AM when the sun finally came out for awhile. It stayed overcast most of the day. We walked later after breakfast. Today was just reading and relaxing. This is a quite campground except for the traffic on the parkway during the day. Lots of motorcycles coming by with their loud exhaust pipes. The campground does not have any hookups or bathouses only a comfort station. There is a place to fill the fresh water tank and a dump station.

NC Mountains 2014 - Days 21 & 22

Day 21 - Thursday 8/28/14 We did our morning walk, had breakfast and departed for Doughton Park at 10AM. We drove North on the Parkway for about 80 miles and arrived about 12:30PM and set up in site 5 that we had reserved. It is a nice level shady site. We relaxed and read until it was time to cook supper. I grilled chicken on the Weber grill. By late evening most of the better sites in the RV loop that we were in were full. Some are to short for the modern Rvs. For future reference sites 5, 18, 19 & 20 would work for us and they can be reserved online. Site 8 would work but it can not reserved. After dark we were serenaded by lots of crickets and other creatures of the night.

Day 22 - Friday 8/29/14 We got up at 7AM and did our morning walk but had to wait until 8AM to start breakfast since we have to run the generator here to provide power to the appliances. We walked over to the tent loop and there were only 4 sites in use out of about of 100. This park, like all the other parks on the Blue Ridge Parkway and many other National Parks do not have bath houses so if you are not in a self-contained RV you have no place to take a shower. Therefore most of the park campgrounds are way underutilized. If the Park Service would put in bath houses the campgrounds would be used more and they could soon recoup the money.

After breakfast we decided to explore the area a little. We drove North on the parkway and took hwy 21 into Sparta to check out the town. We found a car wash on the way in and ran the car through it to get some of the road dust off. We stopped in town at a hardware store that sold the Lodge cast iron cookware like our Dutch Oven, then walked down the street to a retail outlet that sold crafts from local crafts people. The man that was running the store today was a fellow wood turner so we had a nice conversation. Then we walked across the street to a coffee shop to get a coffee and use their WiFi. When we left we drove some of the back road before going back to the campground. I cooked a rack of ribs in the Dutch Oven for supper and then built a campfire.