It was a wet misty ride down Skyline Drive from Mathews Arm to our next campground at Loft Mountain. It was almost Memorial Day weekend, which meant that every campground in the US was going to be full. Loft Mountain, like a lot of campgrounds, sets aside a few walk-up sites that are available on a first-come-first-served basis, so we got a very early start to increase the odds that we would get a site. The dreary weather prevented us from enjoying the views along Skyline Drive; at times, we could hardly see the road ahead at all.
We did see a black bear shortly before arriving at Loft Mountain, which is always neat. He looked cold and miserable. He also looked at the campervan like he wanted to climb in it with us. All of the sites at Loft Mountain were really nice, with most of them being pull-through sites. After choosing a site and paying for it, we headed back out of the park to the town of Ruckersville to buy groceries and kill time. We also ate lunch at an unbelievably good Mexican restaurant called Mi Casa. We were so awed by the flavorful sauces they used that we convinced the owner to sell us a container of his cilantro tomatillo sauce. We gave them a glowing review on Yelp. Jennifer then ran into a Goodwill store and scored a much-needed beanie hat for each of us. The showers in the campground were being renovated, so we stopped to use the temporary trailer showers on our way back to the campground. They were supposed to be heated; they were not. Cooper and Brooks weren’t huge fans of the cold shower and neither were we.
Our first night at Loft Mountain was the first time we ran the furnace. It worked great, and we needed it again on the second night when the temperature dipped below freezing. The next morning I noticed a drip of what looked like sap running down the outside of our slide-out dinette/kids’ bed. After following the sap to its source, we realized that someone (named Jennifer) set our bananas on top of the slide and forgot they were up there. When we made camp and put the slide out, the bananas were squished in to a blob of goo, which is what ran under the weather seal and down the outside. We got a good laugh out of it.
The French family that we met at Mathews Arm showed up at Loft Mountain and we ended up hanging out with them a little bit. In the evening, we headed down to see the scheduled ranger program, but the ranger was a no-show. The amphitheater had an awesome view and was a great place to watch evening turn to twilight.
While inquiring about the ranger program the next day (to see if the other scheduled programs were actually going to happen) we learned that they were doing a Junior Ranger program. We brought Cooper down to the amphitheater that afternoon and so began our adventure with Ranger Marge and bunch of other kids, including the Frenchies. Marge showed the kids how to look for signs of animals. Marge and her troop checked out bugs, a salamander under a rotting log, where a bear had been hibernating in a tree, and Marge’s most prized find: fox poop. She was really excited to dig through that turd pile with a stick to see what it had been eating. The Junior Ranger program was a big hit with Cooper, and she was excited to work through her activity book over the next few days. Brooks slept through most of our walk through the woods with Marge. The rest of our time at Loft Mountain (four nights total) was spent hiking through the woods, playing in our campsite, hanging at the amphitheater, having fires, etc – all the normal camping stuff. It was a great place to spend the long weekend and we look forward to going back some day.
