Afternoon on the Roanoke River

After lunching on Famous Anthony's sandwiches in Roanoke VA, Mel observed that we were pretty close to the Blue Ridge Parkway and we should try to get on it to see the scenery. We reset the trusty Gamin and drove through Roanoke to the Parkway's entrance. We headed South on the Parkway in search of scenic overviews.

In about five minutes we arrived at the Roanoke River View and parked to venture by foot down the small path to the river views. We met a local fisherman along the path. He suggested we to to the “overlook” which was a different and shorter path than the “river”. The path lived up to its word and while narrow was clear and easily walkable, at least as we were headed down hill. We checked out the highway support girders, the river's rapids, a local woodpecker and on the return trip, we stopped at the Niagra electric plant.

Returning to the car we made some additional stops at over views with increasing elevations, snapping some digital records of the journey. After a while we decided it was time to return to the business of getting to the Mississippi by Saturday and returned to I81 enroute to our first night stopping point, Kingsport, TN.