I thought that since I spend so much time in the great outdoors and exploring nature, I really needed to post something for Earth Day. I do have a video coming out tomorrow that celebrates quite a bit of the flower explosion along the Blue Ridge Parkway, but that’s tomorrow, April 23, 2020. Maybe if I force myself to do a blog post every significant holiday or special day I will keep these up to date and keep them going. Although I really don’t want to just do one “just to do one”! I’d rather have something significant to say. If it seems that I really don’t have anything significant to say today, it’s just because I’ve been working from 4 AM until 4 PM for the last week. I have been assigned the job of doing temperature checks of all 1700 our employees as they come into work at 6:30 AM in the morning. And for some reason a lot of then start to come in at 5:00 AM. So I have to get there and get set up and get ready to and then take over from our security guards. It really makes for a very long day. And I’m sure that poor Akela does not understand it. When I do finally come home from work, he just wants to play  and hike and chase balls and sticks for 2 or 3 hours and I just want to collapse. The best part about having a dog is they make it clear to you what is important in life. While I don’t want to minimize the importance of making sure that those 1700 people that are coming into work are not threatened by somebody sneaking in with the COVID-19 virus, I was hoping the company would give me more resources to complete the job. I have activated our emergency medical response team to help. And they have stepped up to the job with incredible enthusiasm. But only for an hour a day when the majority of people come in. The rest of the time I’m running around coordinating them and security and nurses and parking and facilities. Anyways it’s a job and I don’t want to ramble on about it. I feel so bad for those people who are self-employed and are forced to stop working because our society is afraid of a disease. But let’s kill this conversation about COVID-19 here and go on to something more uplifting.

This week’s video is from my feeble attempt to do a review of the Blue Ridge Parkway from end to end. I originally wanted to start at the beginning of where the Parkway was first built. The very first construction on the Parkway was at the Cumberland knob area. The reason for the Parkway is that they had designated Shenandoah National Park and the Smoky Mountains National Park. And they decided it would be really cool to have a scenic roadway connecting the 2. So in 1935 they started building what was originally called  “The Scenic Road”.  Two years later it was given to the National Park Service and renamed the Blue Ridge Parkway. Just through a weird coincidence it was finished in 1987 while I was visiting my sister in Boone, North Carolina. The very last

section to be completed was a raised viaduct just below Grandfather Mountain called the Linn Cove viaduct. In maintaining the natural beauty of the Parkway they decided instead of ripping apart Grandfather Mountain in an area of a major boulder field they would build above it. As a result there is a wonderful hiking trail underneath the viaduct through the boulder field. In the early spring this is a place where it’s very probable to see a number of different snakes native to the area, including rattlesnakes. And that’s what I call seeing the real wild natural world.

But back to my video of the Cumberland knob recreation area. Being that it’s the oldest part of the Parkway, it is a very narrow section of the Parkway. You literally drive through overhanging rhododendron bushes and trees. The road is clear, but there is no real shoulder. And during my trip through that area on 4 of July, 2019 I was driving through massive blooms of rhododendrons and azaleas. It was a grand tour of the Parkway at the time. I Have driven and done videos several sections of the Parkway on 5 different trips and was going to stitch them together into one “Parkway Excursion Documentary”. But with all my travel and camping reservations this month being canceled due to the pandemic, I am reaching down into the video vault to use some of this video to release decent content for people to enjoy. The original documentary was already over an hour long anyways. So it’s probably better I do it in little pieces. While the Parkway is some 469 miles long end-to-end, there is easily a 15 minute video every 10 miles in reality. Campgrounds, historic places, special overlooks, and beautiful hiking trails and mountains that each deserve their own 15 to 30 minute video. So we will hold on to our stash of Blue Ridge Parkway videos and release them out a little bit at a time.  You have been warned!!

So I hope you have time to check out the video this week. In hopes of increasing people watching the video to the very end,  I now stick quite a few photographs at the end of interesting things. So if you’re one of the many people who only watch until the music starts you’re going to miss good stuff. Let me know what you think. I can’t make it better if I don’t know what you think would make it better. So okay folks, stay safe and stay healthy. I can’t afford to lose any of my viewers! We’ll catch you next week in the next video or on here in the next blog.

Call your mother !

Rick, & Akela
Going NoWhereFast