Home Again

Big Meadow in Shenandoah National Park (click to enlarge)

So, finally after 16 days on the road I'm back in Baton Rouge. The trip saved the best for last with Ganesh and I spending five hours of the penultimate day driving through Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. This park has one of the most famous roads in the US, Skyline Drive. It's 105 miles long and slowly winds its way through the mountains of the national park, with stunning views of nearby mountain ranges and the plains below. It took us so long to drive as we were always stopping to check out the view, because they have overlooks every couple of miles. After a few more hours of highway driving we finally got to our hotel in Knoxville, Tennessee, exhausted and ready to be back home in Baton Rouge. The last day of the trip was spent driving the 11 hours southwest to Louisiana and unpacking the truck, before finally heading home to catch a good and long night's sleep.

Typical view from Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park

In our travels for this field trip we passed through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Tennessee. Florida, Texas, and California can also all be added to that list of states I've now visited, so that's 19 out of 50 that can now be ticked off!

In total we drove about 10,300 kilometres (6,400 miles) and we will do it all again in two months or so for the end of summer census. Using Google Maps I more or less mapped our journey and you can check it out below. The colours represent each different day of driving and where the colours overlap and look strange is from us driving the same highway twice or more. The details of the roads taken aren't particularly accurate, but it definitely shows the huge extent of trip.

My parents are coming to visit during June and I'm incredibly excited to be seeing them for the first time in ten months. I'll be flying up to meet them in Boston and then we'll be roadtripping back down to Baton Rouge over the course of the following ten days or so. Until then I'll be relaxing in Baton Rouge as much as possible, and tidying up loose ends of my research work from the spring.