Whitewater Falls

We left the Sweet Briar Motel in Maggies Valley. It was perfect weather. There are quite a few homes built on the hillslopes. They would enjoy the cool summers with night lights below.

 

We backtracked onto the Blue Ridge Parkway which is not known as "America's Favourite Drive" for nothing.

No commercial vehicles are allowed on the Parkway. It has a modest 45 mph speed limit - which is hard to keep to unless you are following an RV. The views are breathtaking and we had a wonderfully clear day with a cool breeze.

The stretch of Parkway we were on includes the highest point on the road.

 

We met Tyler from Peoria, IL who regularly takes time off to travel and camp in some of the most beautiful places. 

After about 20 miles we turned off onto NC215, a narrow strip of blacktop that snakes its way down from the ridge. At the top it was fairly rough, and a little further down there were lengthy road works, but after that it was a wonderful motorcycling road.

At Rosman we stopped for brunch at the Country Skillet diner, a popular meeting place for the locals. This is obviously.....

From there we turned west on US 64 through Lake Toxaway and turned south on WV 281 to Whitewater Falls. This is the highest waterfall on the east coast of the US - at 411 feet, it is twice as high as Niagara Falls, but of course the volume of water is much less.

Turning north on NC 107 we headed to Sylva where we planned to spend the night. On the way we passed vast spreads of kudzu. This is a notorious creeper imported from Asia in the 1920's as a ground cover to control erosion and reduce mowing. Unfortunately it finds the climate here much more to its liking and has now gone completely out of control. The natural flora appears to be totally choked.

 

Kudzu grows so fast you can almost hear it. It blankets everything, including power lines and uninhabited homes, smothering everything underneath it.

We spent the night at the Blue Ridge Inn in Sylva.