Never Meet Your Heroes
They say never meet your heroes. And if you’ve ever met your hero, you know why. If you haven’t, I won’t spoil it for you.
Ok, so I didn’t “meet my hero” on this trip. But I DID plan a trip centered around visiting a location I’d wanted to visit for almost a decade. And when I say plan a trip centered around it, I do mean that I drove 7 hours each way just to go to this ONE place. Now of course I planned a few other things to see and do along the way, but my route centered around visiting Breaks Interstate Park.
As the name might suggest, Breaks sits in two states: Virginia and Kentucky. It’s also known as the “Grand Canyon of the South”, which was what landed it in an outdoors magazine I read forever ago and added it to my list. Being so remote with little services or amenities, Breaks is an amazing place to find some peace and quiet. Just know that if you just go with the flow and don’t plan, you might show up when the on-site restaurant and camp store are closed. Just saying…
Now, about the trip. It’s not often that I take a full week vacation and don’t get on a plane. This gave me the chance to do one of my favorite things, load the car up with outdoor gear and Sally and hit the road. If you know Sal, you’ll know she does not like the car. At. All. I tried to split up the 7 hour ride to Breaks with an overnight stop down in Waynesboro, VA to do some hiking and tire her out for the second half of the car ride. We got really incredible conditions for photography; clouds sitting on the mountains and a nice mist in the woods. After doing some droning to capture the incredible clouds, we hit the woods for a few mile hike. As we were getting lightly rained on, we passed two other hikers. After saying good morning, and saying to them “beautiful weather this morning”, I had to laugh - it was one of those “you know you’re a photographer when” kind of moments.
Our time in Breaks was relaxing. We spent two nights camping there, with the only other campground occupants being an older couple in a tow behind trailer. The park is nice in that it’s relatively small, so you can drive to any of the viewpoints within 15 minutes end to end. Also, all of the hiking trails are relatively short, I think the longest we did was maybe 6 miles. We only came across less than 10 other people the entire time we were there, but all of them were really friendly and were there to enjoy the nature, same as us. While I’m glad I finally visited Breaks, I think there are other places I would’ve gone given a 7 hour driving radius.
The drive home we ran into a few hiccups, and instead of getting to hike the Virginia triple crown around Roanoke, we had to pivot to staying over in Lexington and doing some hikes along the border of West Virginia and Virginia. At the end of the day, we had a great trip and Sal was one very happy, very tired girl.
