My "birthday" trip

For my birthday, I asked my parents if they could watch our kids one night so Dan and I could do some hiking. The second Friday in May, Dan and I dropped of the kids and then headed over to Roanoke. It was raining pretty hard and had been all day. We stopped for Dairy Queen and then drove to the trail head. We were originally going to hike a little bit and then set up camp, but since it was still raining so much, we decided to go ahead and sleep in the van, then wake up early and hike.

It was surprisingly roomy back there once we put the back seat down and pushed the captain seats all the way up.

Saturday morning we woke up at 4:30 and were hiking by 4:50. The first hike we did was McAfee Knob. It's one of the most photographed spots (if not THE most) on the Appalachian Trail. Since we knew that, I figured we needed to get up there around sunrise to avoid the crowds. The hike up was pretty uneventful.

We missed the sunrise by about 20 minutes, but oh, man. It was beautiful! And I was so surprised to find that we had the whole place to ourselves. (We passed one tent on the way up.)

I'm pretty sure I said a million times, "I can't believe we're the only people here right now!"

McAfee Knob was 8.8 miles, I think. We passed a few people on our way down.

Our next hike was Dragon's Tooth, also on the AT. This hike was about 6 miles.


Big rocks jutting up that you could climb on. So that's what we did.

That hike was busier and we saw a lot of thru-hikers. The trail down was amazing. We walked through a rhododendron forest and they were in full bloom. It was so beautiful!

We grabbed some quick Taco Bell for lunch and went back to pick up the kids. Such a great day!