Driving a Mazda Miata to Tierra Del Fuego: Adventures Off, On and Up the Parkway

My journey up the Blue Ridge Parkway is complete, I’m back in the world of Internet connections, and this morning finds me in Charlottesville, VA, where I’ll be staying for the next four days. Try as I might to amble, I’ve arrived in range of my writers’ retreat a week before it begins. Seeing this coming, I booked an AirBnb in Charlottesville for the week, to finish needed edits to my novel and explore the area.

Charlottesville, it’s worth noting, has been in the news lately for a neo-Nazi demonstration, of all things, which led to street violence and pulled our strange, still-untested President Trump into a swirling media scandal. All I can say, arriving in this bucolic little college town where the sun is shining and the birds are chirping, is that I wouldn’t tar a whole town for the actions of a few, but I’ll be keeping my eyes open.

On to a recap of my parkway adventures.

---

It had been nice to finally pull out my tent again, assemble its poles, and spend a night camping for the first time since before entering Mexico. There are several woodsy State Park campgrounds along the parkway, and for my first night I stayed at one called Daughton (which had me humming “The Only Living Boy in New York” as I set up the tent); it had signs posted warning of a bear in the area, and I slept a little uneasily, starting awake whenever the wind flapped the rain fly just outside my head, but otherwise I spent an unmolested night.

Not so with my next day, when I made bold to leave the parkway, and almost didn’t make it back on.

Halfway through my second day I decided to make a quick detour into the city of Roanoke, VA, to have lunch and run a few errands; afterwards I was hoping to get as far North as the “Peaks of Otter” campground. It was a shock to leave the parkway’s quiet, scenic lanes for the truck-shrieking run on a superhighway through the billboards and strip malls of real life, but I found cheap parking in downtown Roanoke, did my errands, and went to a pleasant-looking restaurant called “Corned Beef & Co.” where I ordered the Cobb salad.

That thing gave me food poisoning the likes of which I’ve rarely had in my life. Suffice to say that by the time I left the restaurant I was recalculating for a closer campground called “Roanoke Mountain,” even if I had to drive South, and by the time, a little later, when I got to my car, I was recalculating for the closest motel I could find. Google Maps got me to a Days Inn four minutes away, where I parked, endured the chatty clerk who wanted to talk Miatas and India while checking me in, seemingly oblivious to my white face and propensity to bend double with pain, and made it to my allotted room just in time to run into the bathroom and be sick.

I spent the rest of that day, blurrring into night, recovering in the bed, and by morning I felt wan but better. Being sick on the road is no fun, and when I saw that the day had dawned in a steady downpour I felt obscurely that my time on the Blue Ridge Parkway was done.

Instead I headed straight for an attraction to which I’d intended to detour later: Poplar Forest, a one-time rural retreat of Thomas Jefferson with a house designed by him. It was a quick drive on regular roads through rainy Virginia towns and landed suburbs, and I required Google Maps to find it in its warren-like neighborhood of little streets and red-brick houses, but it’s a curious place, well worth seeing. It does, in fact, have a handsome and characteristic octagonal house designed by Jefferson.

The attraction is fairly new, as the house is almost entirely a reconstruction: it had several owners after Jefferson who did extensive remodeling, interrupted by a fire in 1845 that gutted the whole interior, and it’s only recently that it has re-emerged in its old clothes, as it were, thanks to a non-profit corporation. The restoration work is still going on, and workmen were hammering in the unfinished interior as we few visitors got the rainy-day tour. We asked more questions, actually, of the workmen, who pointed out the different types of wood used for doors and tables, how they sourced the period door hardware, etc. It was interesting to visit a half-complete restoration project, and see the skill and attention that goes into it.

But even in shell form you could see Jefferson’s whimsies, like the two-part bedroom with the bed in a wall in the middle (enabling morning access to either side), and feel his rationalist spirit in the soaring 20-foot-high central dining room, a perfect cube lit by a great skylight. (Photography wasn’t allowed indoors.)

Afterwards I went into nearby Lynchburg with the daunting task of finding some gentle road food for my stomach. My radar, at least, was working pretty well: I picked out a coffeehouse called the White Hart Café, found a parkingspot right outside the door, and it turned out to be a homey, friendly spot where I could order a bowl of hot oatmeal with brown sugar and bananas—the perfect meal to settle my stomach.

Thus restored, I decided to forge back onto the Blue Ridge Parkway in the late afternoon despite the rain. I’m glad I did. The little blue Parkway sign off the regular road ushered me back into its secret world with some its most breathtaking scenery yet, in a footbridge stroll across and along the James River made even lovelier by the damp day.

The rain had lightened when I set up my tent at the Otter Creek State Park campground, getting me only slightly wet, and I was snug and dry inside by the time it trappled down harder again. I spent a cozy and slightly cold night (somehow it’s become Fall) with no bears, and by midnight no rain taps on my tent roof, just the chuckle of the nearby creek.

I got an early start the next morning (yesterday), and drove the rest of the Parkway, past mountain valleys throttled and foaming with rising clouds, through misty woods where opening fans of sunlight angled over the road, around spots of sun into which dripping trees rained golden coins, over airplane-high vistas of a night-green forest shaved about in half-inch-deep cutouts of clover-green farms away to the bright horizon.