Grayson Highlands State Park 2023 Trip

Trip: 33
Nights: 105-107

We spent Memorial Day weekend at Grayson Highlands State Park, in SW Virginia. It was my 4th trip there. It was my wettest trip there, or anywhere, since we got the trailer. Grayson is one of my two favorite Virginia State Parks, First Landing is the other.

The trip there was uneventful. We knew the forecast was sketchy, but in the mountains anything can happen with the weather, so we went for it. Also, there are worse ways to spend a weekend than chilling in a camper without a cell signal.

Saturday turned out to be a nice day, breezy and cool, with the raining holding off until about 7 PM. We hiked out to see the ponies, then Michelle went back to the campsite and I continued down the Appalachian Trail to a shelter that I used as a turn around point. That afternoon we did another trail that put us at one of the highest points in the park.

I used that elevation to pick up 2 bars of T-Mobile service and watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to fix the permanent door ajar light on a 2011 Ford Edge. Then I executed the fix back at the campsite, thereby saving the battery in the vehicle. It had been an off and on issue for a while, and decided to go permanent while I was 20 miles from civilization.

Saturday night it started raining and it didn't stop until Monday. On Sunday, we only left the trailer for a bathroom run. We watched two movies (Enola Holmes 1 and 2, both highly recommended), a bunch of downloaded YouTube videos of a CDT thru hike, and we played a lot of Gin Rummy and Spades. The forced relaxation without the distraction of the Internet was kind of fun.

On Monday we broke camp in a light rain, and then near Roanoke on I-81 North I put the truck in park and sat there for 2+ hours while a multi-car and truck with multiple fatalities accident was cleared up. The accident was barely a mile in front of us. If we had left a few minutes earlier we might have been mixed up in it. If we had left 5 minutes later GPS might have routed us around the accident. Perfect timing! Once we got moving again the rest of the trip home was uneventful, until we got the pizza joint to pick up dinner, and I learned I had sent the order to the wrong location. When we finally made it home we learned the Internet had been out all weekend, and stayed out until Verizon got somebody out the next day.

I swear I don't believe in stuff like, "bad things happen in threes," except when I'm in the third bad thing to happen in a day.

In over 100 nights out in the camper, that is the first time we've had a day where we simply could not leave the camper all day, and also the first time we hit that bad of a traffic incident. So I really can't complain.