After leaving The Big Apple, we thought we would have a couple of chill out days by the ocean. We went to Cape May, a very nice town full of gorgeous houses and a nice ocean front. As it was almost Halloween, we saw so many houses with great decorations.

This was also the first place we saw RV’ers and locals using golf buggies as a mode of transport around campgrounds and the local area!

We cycled to Wildwood, a large town that in the summer is incredibly busy, due to its large fun fair, and huge sandy beaches. It has a cool 1950/60’s vibe going on with its buildings and neon signs. It was nice to be there in the off season, and to see dolphins swimming close to the shore! 

We then drove inland and visited Harpers Ferry, a lovely historic place, very picturesque because it’s at a confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. It was also very noisy – freight trains, about a mile long each time, over a bridge, about every 20 minutes, with their horns going! We were on the bridge when one came right by us, if we had had ear defenders we would have worn them, incredibly loud! Great history from the Civil War, it swopped hands between the Confederates and Federals a few times. We also did a bike ride along the Chesapeake and Ohio (C & O) canal to another town of significance, Sharpsburg and the Antietam National Battlefield, from the Civil War.

From there we drove to Shenandoah National Park. The drive itself was beautiful, especially the last part, on part of the Skyline Drive, through the trees and looking down numerous autumn coloured valleys.

The  National Park have several campgrounds in this park and these are great. Good value for money, nice settings and good size pitches. Julie was happy as even the cost of using the laundromat was cheap, so time to get up to date with all the laundry! However what we loved most about this location was the great hiking, so many well marked trails, including the Appalachian trail running right through the site. The Appalachian Trail is 2,200 miles long and runs between Springer Mountain, Georgia and Mount Katahdin, Maine. We walked a few miles of it, but not sure about doing the full trail, as you have to carry tents etc!! One of the other great thing about this site was the white tailed deer, who alarmingly weren’t bothered by human presence and walked around the site nibbling at the bushes.

We would have stayed on longer here, but these National Park sites get booked up well in advance and weekends are their busy time, so they had no room for us come the Friday night. So we went back down the valley, to another Harvest Host. This one was more Julie’s style, a cidery! Lovely place and lovely people, who make very nice cider. In fact, it was all so nice, we asked if we could stay an extra night and they agreed. We were very close to Lexington, and another customer in the cidery told us about the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) , as he was an alumnus of there. This sounded really interesting, so we went off to the town the next day. We saw the VMI campus, founded in 1839, America’s first state military college. It has a strong connection with the Civil war, and its cadets saw active duty during the war. General ‘Stonewall’ Jackson was a military instructor here, before his death during the Civil War. We saw military students parading, joined in a tour to find out what life was like on a military campus, and watched a college football game. We now know we don’t like American football, far too many long stops in between very short plays! We had a funnel cake and deep fried oreos! Lexington itself is a nice town, very walkable and lots of independent shops. 

Keeping in the military theme, the next day we visited Bedford, Virginia. A small town, that proportionately suffered the greatest losses of any American town in World War II, inspiring the National D-Day memorial to be placed in Bedford, and was the story behind the film, Saving Private Ryan. When we thought of a memorial, we thought of some structure that we would visit for about 15 minutes. We were there for 2 hours on a guided tour of the whole site, which included giving us a recap of D-Day, from an American perspective. Really interesting, but it was a chilly day, and we were under prepared!

To read about the next part of our journey through the USA please see our blog on Washington, thanks for reading.