Shenandoah National Park
As I have stated several times in my blog, I love to camp and hike and my son usually does an annual father-son camping/hiking trip, which is the highlight of my year. I’m going to recap some of those trips for you in this blog.
One of our favorite spots to go camping is the Big Meadows recreational area of the Shenandoah National Park on Skyline Drive. We love this spot for several reasons, but mostly because it fits perfectly into our way of camping and hiking. We call it flop and drop and spoke hiking.
Flop and drop are where you pretty much bring your gear in a vehicle and park at the campsite or very near the campsite and you drop your gear and your flop your happy but down and camp. The spoke hiking is where you use your campsite as the center of the wheel and you spoke out to a different spot and back (round trip) every day.
We prefer this over hiking which is where you carry everything you need with your (which we have done before as well) because you usually can’t have a campfire when you are camping in the backcountry like that and we love our nightly campfires.
In 2010 my son and I had an opportunity of a lifetime and we got to go on a 14-day adventure to New Mexico with our Boy Scout troop. This is usually the highlight of most scouts’ journey from Tiger Cub up through the ranks. In 2008, our boy scout troop entered into the Philmont lottery system in the hopes of “winning” a spot to go to Philmont. Our troop was selected and we earned a spot to go to Philmont in 2010. Two years before the actual trip, the scouts will form a crew of 6-10 boys and 2-4 adults. The crew is specifically organized for this one trip. The crew will train formally and informally for the next two years in order to make the Philmont trip a success. The individual boys must pay their own way for the trip. Our crew started training with classroom courses and hiking as a unit and individually. My son and I went on at least four hiking trips with the crew and a half dozen hiking trips of our own, breaking in our boots, trying out gear, reducing the weight of our packs, and so on.
