Using free hotel nights to enable a great trip to the Blue Ridge Parkway

We recently flew my wife’s sister and her family, five people in all, to Charlotte from Managua (more on that booking later). As part of showing them around town, we wanted to take them to someplace fun but still relatively close by, since a road trip with seven kids (four of ours plus three of theirs) is a lot of work.

I have three favorite drives in the United States: Route 1 up the California coast between Santa Barbara and San Francisco; Highway 1 from the Everglades to Key West; and pretty much anywhere on the Blue Ridge Parkway. For those of you who have never been, I highly recommend it. Like the Pacific Coast Highway, it’s a two lane road that’s more about scenery than about getting you rapidly from point A to point B. This is what it looks like in the fall:

Of course, everybody wants to go in the fall to watch the leaves so it can get crowded, especially on the weekends. But a random Friday during the summer? Not even slightly crowded!

Our first stop was for some gem mining at Gem Mountain.  Just off the Parkway, it’s a place where you can engage in actual mining. Or, you can do what we did which is buy a huge bucket filled with a bunch of gravel and salted with semi-precious stones of all types–amethyst, rubies, emeralds, and so forth. (Rubies and emeralds can of course be very valuable, but the ones given out here are lower quality.)

They have flumes where you wash off the stones and look for colorful, sparkly, or just plain interesting stones. It is actually a lot of fun–this is a great activity for anyone age five or over, including adults. Everyone really enjoyed it. Here’s what the operation looks like:

The picture at the top of the page is also from Gem Mountain; look in the background of the flume picture above and you can see the cabin. I took that one myself and Google auto-enhanced it, which is a neat feature of Droid phones.

Here’s a ruby we found:

Like I said, it’s not going to be set into the crown jewels or anything but it’s still neat to hold a nice big ruby in your hand.

Next stop: The Orchard at Altapass, right down the Parkway from Gem Mountain. This apple orchard is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit set up about 20 years ago to preserve the land as well as a bit of the Appalachian culture. It’s not apple season, so we didn’t go picking, but we had brought along a picnic lunch and we got to enjoy it from the back porch of the orchard’s building. And I do emphasize the word “enjoy”: mild weather, a pleasant breeze, peace and quiet. This is what our view looked like at lunch:

There’s also an exceptionally friendly golden retriever named Opie:

They have regularly scheduled live music as well. You may even see some locals dancing:

This was my first visit to The Orchard, but I’ll definitely be back–it is a wonderful place.

Next stop: Mount Mitchell State Park. Mount Mitchell is the highest point in the United States east of the Missisippi. The great thing about this park from a family perspective is that you can drive almost all the way to the top. The hike from the parking lot to the very top is a few hundred yards, and the pathway is paved. Here’s what the view looks like:

And here’s me experimenting with the panorama setting on my phone:

“But wait,” you say, “we haven’t heard any tales of credit card points or hotel redemptions!” Here you go: we swapped 60,000 IHG points for three rooms at a Holiday Inn. It was adequate: we had dinner there, slept, and then left the next morning. It helped us take this trip: staying there beats driving two extra hours when we’re already worn out, plus it gets us out of the house for a night and is a change from the usual routine.

In other words, it was a great redemption, end of story. But heck, who needs a hotel review with scenery like this?