SKYLINE DRIVE, VIRGINIA, USA

105 miles of magnificent landscapes throughout Shenandoah National Park

Skyline Drive connects Front Royal in the north and Interstate 64 in the south. It's the only road that runs through the whole park. We drove by magnificent views and hundreds of miles of hiking tracks, of many different lengths and degrees of difficulty.

We made a first stop at the Dickey Ridge visitor center (+- mile 5). The view was amazing, so we decided to eat the breakfast we brought on a bench under one of the trees.

The park has 4 entrance stations: Front Royal (north), Thornton Gap (around mile 30), Swift Run Gap (around mile 65) and Rockfish Gap (south, you can continu on Dickey Ridge Parkway here). We drove the whole 105 miles from north to south on a sunny day at the end of June (2015) and had a great, very calm ride! The entrance fee is only $20 per car per week. The speed limit is 35 mph (and in turns often less), so you really have time to enjoy all the wonderful views.

Our hotel in Front Royal was located at only a few minutes from the park entrance. We arrived about 9am and after only a few 100 meters we already saw a squirrel and a deer! We weren't expecting them so soon, so we only managed to take a picture of the squirrel. But no worries, we saw plenty of deer later on!

We then were totaly ready for the adventure and hit the road. In the beginning, we stopped literally at EVERY overlook, because we couldn't get enough of the beautiful landscapes. It took us almost 4 hours to drive the first 40 miles, but it was worth it!

Around 1pm we arrived at the starting point of the Stony Man Trail and we started walking. According to the documentation we got from the park's website, this is a medium-hard trail of about 1,6 miles in the forest, leading to a great viewpoint. I'm not really sure what we saw was the summit of the Stony Man Trail because we took a wrong turn somewhere along the road and ended up following a part of the Little Stony Man Trail. The walk was rather easy with only a few steep sections. Anyway, the viewpoint was impressive and really worth the walk!!

We stayed at the viewpoint for about 20 minutes and then continued our walk, to finally discover we didn't get back to our car, but to the starting point of the Little Stony Man, which is about 3 miles away from where we had to be... We decided to hike back following Skyline Drive rather than taking the trail back. This later appeared to be an excellent choice because we finally saw a deer at only a few meters from the road!

When we finally got back to the car, it was already 4pm and we still had more than 60 miles to go (plus the 30 miles between the exit of the park and our hotel in Charlottesville), so we decided to skip the hike to Dark Hollow falls we had planned. It was already 5pm when we got there and it had started to rain - and also, we didn't want to get stuck in the forest after dark after getting lost again :) We still stopped at many of the overlooks along the rest of the road, but we spent less time at each of them. We finally exited the park around 7pm, which was a perfect time because the sun was going down so we still got some great views to end with!

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