This summer Kira and I took a long trip with the primary purpose to visit her family in Massachusetts. We moved out of our apartment at the end of May and left for MA on the 2nd of June.
We had about ten days of hiking planned on the way over, going through Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. On the whole, our plan worked out pretty well. We did most of the hikes that we’d planned and saw a lot of cool things. Here is the full photo gallery.
The only major problem was the combination of humidity and mosquitoes. I was wearing long sleeves and pants to protect against bites, but it was warm and humid, so I was sweating a lot. The other challenge was finding a place to sleep each night. We were primarily car camping, but it was a little too warm for that to be comfortable unless we found a spot at higher elevation. If it was too hot, then we would try set up the tent, but it is much harder to find a spot that allows free tent camping.
The first two hikes were in the Daniel Boone national forest in Kentucky. Both were a little too popular and had more people than was good for Kira. But the arches were cool.
Our next hike was at Cumberland falls. We stayed on the west side of the river away from the main visitor center and did a hike along the Cumberland to see the main falls and eagle creek falls.
That day we also did a hike to dog slaughter falls which is also on the Cumberland river. That falls was also very pretty and we also saw some cool wildlife:
The next day we drove in Virginia and hiked to the sand cave and then stopped at Breaks Interstate Park on the way north. Sand Cave was really great. It was a large sandstone cave with deep fine sand on the bottom. There was a little waterfall over the top and there was water seeping through the cave, but it was surprising for there to be so much sand.
On the way north, we stopped at Breaks Interstate Park. It was a little oversold, but there were some neat rock formations and crevasses to hike around and explore.
The next day we did a hike adjacent to the Appalachian trail called Rhododendron gap. We didn’t really know what to expect, but the rhododendron were in full bloom and we hiked through a couple miles of bushes. It was stunning and we took a ridiculous number of photos. The pictures don’t really capture the situation though, because the impressive part was how long it went on and how many flowers there were.
The next day we planned to hike a section of the Appalachian trail near McAfee’s knob. But I pulled a muscle in my back a little trying to get the cooler out of the car, so I skipped the hike and got in a day of work while Kira hiked.
The next day we did North Mountain near Lexington and Chimney Top near Seneca rocks. North mountain was a ridge top hike to a cave. We found the cave, but there were quite a few spiders that we didn’t recognize so we didn’t fully explore it. We saw our first red eft of the trip which was pretty exciting. The Chimney top hike was one of the prettiest hikes that we did. It was threatening rain when we started and there was a lot of fog in the middle. But when we got to the top things had cleared up some and we were above the clouds and had good views.
The last day of this part of the trip was the least exciting. We did a couple of hikes near Seneca rocks. One along a ridge above Seneca to High Knob and another along Seneca creek.
We arrived in Massachusetts on the 13th of June. We spent a couple of days with her parents and then went up to Conway lake. Her parents had reserved a cabin but weren’t feeling well enough to go themselves. The cabin was right on the lake and we did several days of kayaking. We also went for a hike on Mt Chocorua.
See Part 2 for our trip from Massachusetts through Maine to New Brunswick