About
James May Gin and Shenandoah National Park. Time for some Gin and another National Park.
A couple of weeks before Laura's birthday she stumbled on a James' May Gin Tour in Virginia. Since it was only 2.5 hours north into VA, we thought we would make a small trip out of it and combine it with Shenandoah National Park and Luray Caverns. A nice spontaneous trip.
James May Gin
Ok, not to bury the lead, Laura got to meet James May and get a signed bottle of gin!
Yes it's the guy from Top Gear. Yes he started his own line of Gin. Yes, it's pretty good.
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Skyline Drive
If you are unfamiliar, Skyline Drive is pretty much the Northern Blue Ridge Parkway. It's 105 miles long and takes hours. Hours of driving with tons of overlooks. You know what you are getting into. In retrospect I'm thinking doing the entire thing is just a bit too much unless you really love driving. And, while I hate to say it, once you've seen 10 overlooks, you have seen most of them.
On a humors note, the Park Picture with the two of us together has become a thing. With only the two of us, one of us takes the picture and then holds really still while the other runs over to take the camera and swap. After a bit of Photoshop magic, and we both get to be in the same picture.
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Lodges
Unlike the Blue Ridge Parkway, Skyline drive does have two lodges directly along the road. Big Meadows Lodge and Skyland.
Skyland was originally a private resort built in 1895 and only taken over by the park service in 1931. Big Meadows was purpose built as a Park Lodge in 1939. It's a toss up. I think Skyland would have been great back in the day. You can tell the main halls are built for entertainers and maybe a band with dancing. Now, it's just a bit empty and sad. We only had lunch in Big Meadows but they did look to have a much better common area but I cant say if anyone used it in the evenings as we stayed at Skyland.
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Luray Caverns
The last time I visited Luray Caverns was 33 years ago in 1993 so I was interested to see what I thought now.
On the downside. During Covid the park changed from a tour guided experience to a walk at your own pace. Unfortunately even years later they have not figured out a way to give you the same experience. They have a pamphlet with numbers for the areas that you can read. Well you can try to read, they never added any lights near the numbers so it's all in the dark. O wait, they did add a QR code at the very end so you could read it on your phone. If you knew it was there. If you could get cell service in a cave when you figure this out. Really poor implementation. Nothing about the story of the cave being discovered or anything about the history. They also changed the entrance to the caves iun 2019 so they could be "stair" free but for me that really removed a park of the experience for the worse.
On the upside. OMG camera tech has improved so much it's amazing. Specifically cameras in phones. All of the major cameras now take multiple images in HDR and combine them using AI and HDR and the pictures are better than anything I could get from my DSLR. They have also tried to make the Caverns as just part of a larger experience that now includes a Car museum, garden maze, rope adventure, and Heritage Village, so it's much easier to make a full day of it.
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Art Museum
We had some time to kill before James May and Gin, so Laura found us the Virgina Museum of Fine Art. A fine way to burn a couple of hours. They have a Dali, the Faberge Egg Collection, and the Worsham-Rockefeller Bedroom which was rather cool. Worth a stop and a great stumble upon.
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