Breakfast at our hotel was quite frankly depressing. No one could even find a menu. They really seemed like they didn’t want to serve us breakfast. So we went in search elsewhere but returned empty handed. We ended up buying 2 stale croissants and eating them in our room before hightailing it outta there. Sorry Roanoke, we did want to like you.

Actually it was only the downtown area we didn’t like, the rest was fine. In fact we found a cute cafe that made good coffee just a little out of town. The staff even liked our Wilco tshirts (yes we were both wearing a Wilco shirt) and we told them about Solid Sound and talked about North Adams etc etc

After a better breakfast we headed off back on to the Parkway. First stop was Peaks of Otter visitor Center. We asked about some hikes and stuff and were very disappointed that we didn’t stay at the Peaks of Otter Lodge. It’s hard to knew about these things when you don’t actually see them in real life.

We decided to do a hike down to a waterfall. It was really hot and humid and the hike was quite the descent – and then the ascent to get back up. It was quite tough. We didn’t see any bears.

When we got back to the top lunch was in order so we ate a previously purchased sandwich in the car as per tradition. Well our new tradition anyway.

While we were eating lunch we saw two people start the trail – the lady was wearing open toed sandals – I’m not sure how she would manage in those but they didn’t turn back so I guess they did!

We drive on and stopped at another little lookout. Made some friends with some random people who took a photo of us.

Hmmm what else did we do? We did a lot of driving and stopping to look at vistas and spotting wildlife (no more bears sadly)

And then we had left the Blue Ridge Parkway and started driving on Skyline and in to the Shenandoah National Park.

We checked in to our accommodation at Big Meadows Lodge. It was pretty cool.

We had dinner at the lodge which was average and went and looked at the sunset which was spectacular.