A Ciaowagen "Roads" Trip

Except for two recent weekend camping trips, the Ciaowagen has been sitting in storage since August 2024. During the intervening time, we took a two-and-a-half month trip to Australia and New Zealand, a forty-day trip to Norway, Svalbard, Copenhagen, and Iceland, and had two joint replacements: Jeannette's right shoulder and Doug's right knee. It's high time we dusted off our rig and got back on the RV road!

For 2025, we're combining four road trips into an epic adventure.

First, we'll take the Great River Road, following the entire Mississippi River from its source in Minnesota to its mouth near New Orleans. For that portion of our trip, we'll be traveling in a caravan with other RVers - a new experience and, frankly, an experiment for us.

We'll spend the first half of September driving 1,500 miles from our Virginia home to Bemidji, Minnesota for the start of the caravan. We plan to spend some time in Pittsburgh PA, Dayton OH, Indianapolis IN, and Madison WI along the way.

At the end of the caravan in New Orleans, we'll return home to Virginia on two national parkways - the Natchez Trace and the Blue Ridge - and on Tennessee's Cumberland National Scenic Byway.

The Natchez Trace Parkway is a scenic 444-mile drive through Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. It starts in Natchez, Mississippi and ends in Nashville.

On our way to the Blue Ridge, we'll explore the Cumberland Gap area, where Daniel Boone blazed a trail in the late 1700s that facilitated western expansion.

We'll then head south to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where we hope to arrive during the fall colors.

From the Smokies, we'll head northeast along the 469 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway, or at least as much of it that's open since damage from 2024's Hurrican Helene is still being repaired in some places.

At the north end of the Blue Ridge Parkway, we'll connect to the 105-mile-long Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park for the final push toward home.

Shenandoah is our "home" national park, and it will only take an hour's drive from the north end of the Skyline Drive to reach our house.

We'll leave at the beginning of September and return to Virginia in early November.

We hope you'll follow along! More blog posts coming soon...