Edinburg, VA to Asheville, NC
Today we’re going to talk about shit!!
As we are leaving our first campsite, it was time to empty the black tank for the first time. For non campers, you have 3 tanks in the camper. Fresh for fresh potable water. Grey tank water is from your sinks and showers. And the black tank is from the toilet.
This is obviously a crappy situation but when you have the luxury of peeing in the camper rather than walking in the middle of the night to a bathhouse, you gotta do what you gotta do. Now I have watched several YouTube videos on the subject. This isn’t something I wanted to wing and figure out on my own. I felt confident that we could do it, but just in case I asked the camp host Suzie to come down and assist us. She was so sweet and kind and she talked us through everything just as a reminder, which was good because Jason hadn’t watched the videos yet. I grabbed the black hand gloves from Jason and said that I wanted to do the first “dump” and giggled to myself. 😂
I won’t walk you through every step, but it all came out smoothly. Phew! We had already packed up everything up and attached the camper to the 4Runner and we were on the road by 10am heading to Asheville, NC.
Why people make plans
It should be about a 5.5 hour drive to Asheville…. Or so we thought. Looking at the map, we knew we could go down the Blue Ridge Parkway to get to Asheville so we wanted to catch that. I thought I put the right roads in and it would add about an hour to our trip to just onto the Parkway so we detoured onto it. The GPS then added 2.5 hours onto the trip. I go to try to reroute us back to I-81 and then all of a sudden- no cell service. Shit.
Jason had been looking for a safe place to stop for the dogs to stretch their legs so he took the next turn figuring we’d be able to find a spot to sit and look at the map closer. There was a sign for Sherando Lake so we figured it must me close by. Well after we took the turn we realized we weren’t close to anything. It was a windy road to the bottom of the mountain with no place to turn off to the side. We meandered down and noticed we were lower on gas than we wanted to be. More shit.
Finally after going down the mountain for a few miles we came upon Shernado Lake. We asked the park ranger where the closest gas station was and she directed us 3 more miles down the road but warned us it was very overpriced. We accepted our punishment and drove down the road. We missed it the first time and had to turn around in a church parking lot which proved to be another adventure as what seemed like a road that just went behind the church and around had a pretty big ditch at the end of it which we didn’t want to pull the camper through. We backed up and got back over to the gas station where someone pulled in right in front of us and blocked where we needed to go to get gas. This person, very much unaware of their surroundings, went into the gas station to buy items. Arg. We took this as a moment to breathe and look at the maps. We decided that once we paid for this far too expensive gas we would turn around and go back up to the top of the ridge and hope for cell service up there. There were no clearer maps that would show us another way.
Back on the Road again
Back on the top of the ridge we found an overlook and let the dogs out finally. I had cell service here so I readjusted our GPS to get us to Asheville in the quickest time possible. We would be getting in to the city around 8:00 now and that was much later than we anticipated. Oh and have I mentioned that we didn’t book a campground yet because we had no cell service so I couldn’t call any place to find availabilities? Yeah. That’s right. It’s about 2pm now, we don’t have a place to stay, and we’re just getting back on track even though we left 4 hours ago. We knew these days would happen but this was definitely more stressful than I bargained for.
Natural Bridge
We drove a few hours more and came upon a place Jason had wanted to stop at, the Natural Bridge. While he went into the visitor’s center, I scored us a campground 8 minutes outside of downtown Asheville at the Bear Creek Campground. Phew! I felt better now and could enjoy this short walk to a natural wonder.
The Natural Bridge was 100+ stair steps down from the visitor’s center and it was quite the sight to see. Glad that we took the time to stop here and reset about what this trip is about. I also was able to get some close up pictures of a butterfly on a flower. Loving Jason’s new cell phone camera!
We had a while to go to Asheville so we listened to music and took pictures as we drove. We stopped to make sandwiches for ourselves because we hadn’t planned for the added time today. What a luxury it is to stop and open up and make a sandwich from a still cold fridge!
On our way again, we entered Tennessee before heading into North Carolina. The weather began to change and it down-poured several times while we were on the highway. Woooo! Jason did incredible handling the roads and the camper.
While we weren’t quite in the true Smokey mountains yet, we got our first glimpse of what that meant. Wow! Truly beautiful.
We arrive at the campground around 8:15pm and were unhooked from the 4Runner and set up by 8:45. There were two other Rpods in this campground and we were parked next to one! I was very excited about this.
We finished off the left over pizza for dinner and headed to bed. This was a much longer day than planned. Tomorrow we get to enjoy Asheville, NC.
Vegan On the Rhode 