We spent a week at the Endless Caverns RV park about a half hour drive from Shenandoah National Park in late October. The primary intent of this stop was to tour and hike the park. It ended up as a bit more than that as Jessie, Damon, and the kids joined us for the Halloween weekend.
So far we’ve found each of the National Parks we visited to be unique and Shenandoah is no exception. It was one of the parks built in the 1930’s by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression. The park is physically long and thin and runs along the top of the Blue Ridge mountains for about 100 miles. The Appalachian Trail runs through almost all of it. You gain entry though entrances spaced roughly 30 miles apart and drive through outstanding vistas on every turn. There are a lot of trails of varying difficulties – we hiked 4 or 5 of the easy ones, primarily because Suzanne’s walking limitations. Although she’s making a steady recovery from her broken foot, it’s slow going and will take another year before it’s fully healed.
Endless Caverns is not your average RV park – one that we would return to in a heartbeat. It’s on a mountain side with major terracing. They have their own caverns (cleverly named “Endless Caverns”) that you can tour for a fee. We didn’t see it as we planned to go to the big one: Luray Caverns. The only glitch was that the summer and fall were so dry that the campground well ran dry. Fortunately, the campground brought in truck loads of water and we had enough in our on-board RV tank to get through.
The major surprise was the Halloween tradition at the campground. When we arrived the park was nearly empty. By Friday night it was completely full and nearly all the sites were decorated for Halloween. Saturday night was awesome – trick or treating on a scale we’ve never seen. We bought a lot of candy and ran out of it in just over 20 minutes. We took the kids out and they came back with a bundle. We’ve since discovered that major holiday celebrations are a key part of the RV culture and that many parks fully book for the holiday weekend months in advance. We may try to book in Charleston James park for one of the “Christmas weekends” next year.
Near the end of our week we went to see the Luray Caverns. Although it was somewhat of a “touristy” destination, it still was fun and interesting. They had a great tour through impressive mineral formations. The culmination is a “stalactite organ” which is advertised as the worlds largest musical instrument. This was well worth the trip and expense and has caused us to move Carlsbad Caverns National Park up on our “todo” list.