Creeper Trail

We had an unusual free weekend - no need to go house hunting in Atlanta, too early to start packing, nothing else planned - so we decided Saturday morning to call the dog sitter and take an impromptu camping trip so we could bike the Virginia Creeper Trail, something we'd been planning to do for a while but hadn't quite gotten around too.

Now, I like to consider myself an experienced camper. I lived in the "Wilderness House" dorm my freshman year, and spent a quarter of my junior year backpacking through the Sierra. We don't go often now, though, so it was interesting to note certain evolutions in the craft. For one thing, when we used to go camping in college in national forests, a campsite was like $6. Now it's $19. I blame poor Republican stewardship of the economy.

Also, I think it's interesting that the ground has become much harder and less comfortable to sleep on over the years since college. This I attribute to global warming.


The Creeper Trail is a 35-mile former railroad track bed that has been converted into a dedicated bike/hike trail. We're not regular bikers, so the trip up to White Top Mountain from Damascus was grueling - mile after mile winding our way up to 5,500 feet, the peak seemingly moving just as fast as we were into the distance. I'll tell you, if we hadn't been in an air-conditioned, chauffered shuttle bus it really could have been a problem.


Fortunately, it's downhill almost all the way, rarely near any roads and mostly just an easy pedal past bucolic farms, bucolic streams, and various other forms of bucolosity. It does turn out that if you do the whole 35-mile trip to Abingdon, not just the first 18 or so to Damscus, there's a pretty good stretch of uphill riding that I think they don't tell you about on purpose. It was good if not particularly welcome exercise, and I was very proud of Leslie for powering all the way through it. And don't feel bad, World And Everyone In It, she didn't mean those things she said around mile 29.

No relaxing for a while now. Next weekend we pack, the weekend after that is a last-ditch open house to try to unload this place in Greensboro, and after that we move. Leslie was down in Atlanta last week doing a walkthrough of our place and brought pack some pictures. I don't know if you can really get any sense of it this way, but here is the outside, the view from the kitchen to the living room, and vice versa. The master is on the third floor, and the first floor is the office and second bedroom. Poor old Fife isn't getting a one-level house yet after all.