Day 2.57: Chapel Hill, NC to McGaheysville, VA

We got up and said goodbye to Bruce and Nancy before hitting the road to Greensboro, which was only about an hour away. We met Eliana and Ben, two USY friends who both work at American Hebrew Academy there. We were planning to eat at Scrambled, a brunch place, but the wait was insanely long, so we settled instead on the restaurant next door, Hops Burger Bar. Abe got a veggie burger made from cauliflower and mushrooms which tasted okay but was a bit too soft. Arielle wasn’t so hungry so she just got sweet potato fries.

After a nice time hearing about Eliana and Ben’s future plans, we got back on the road to drive north into Virginia towards Shenandoah National Park. We stopped at a gas station and ended up going to the supermarket, pausing to make lunch.

Our plans for the day nearly got derailed when we got to the Rockfish Gap entrance station to the park and found that it was closed. Apparently there is still lots of debris from a November ice storm and so the first forty miles of Skyline Drive, the road that runs through the park, have been closed since then. We also saw a sign about the government shutdown which obviously hadn’t been updated since January, which makes some sense given that the park operates minimally during the winter. Not ready to lose momentum, we drove on a route that runs parallel to the park and opted to head to our hotel when we just a few minutes from the Swift Run Gap entrance. We arrived at the Cave Hill Farm Bed and Breakfast, which we had booked the night before, and were very pleased with our choice. Arielle had called ahead to request the Bridal Room, which features a canopy bed from the 1700s! It was really nice, and we were very excited to return and experience it.

We got a hike recommendation from the innkeeper, Jordan, and drove about half an hour into the park to the Bearfence Mountain Trailhead. We were a bit surprised by the intense nature of the rock scramble we had to climb to get to an admittedly fantastic view of the sunset, and we decided that we definitely couldn’t stay there until the sun went down since it was treacherous enough to climb even when we could see where we were stepping. We made it down before the sun was all the way down and drove about a mile to the Point Overlook, where we stood with a few people with fancy cameras to watch the end of the sunset.

We drove out of the park to head to one of the top restaurants that was still open, Ciro’s Italian Eatery. Abe enjoyed a pasta fagioli soup while Abe started with a Caesar salad, and we shared penne ala vodka and fettucine alfredo as our main courses.

We were beyond excited to discover that there was a Bruster’s Ice Cream only about twenty minutes away, and devastated when we arrived to find that they closed at nine o’clock rather than ten as indicated on both Yelp and Google Maps. Luckily, the employees who were cleaning up were so nice and gave us each a scoop of whatever flavor we wanted that they had left. Abe got banana and Arielle got Cookie Craze, and we held on to them until we got back to the bed and breakfast, which was only about fifteen minutes away. We talked for a bit with Jordan about our evening at the park and set a time for breakfast in the morning. We ate our ice cream and prepared for a very comfortable sleep in this very old bed and lovely room.

Approximate number of miles covered: 323