The facilities at the Seneca Shadows campground were better than any we’ve experienced at other forest service campground. Flush toilets have become a welcome standard but we have never had hot, spacious, free showers at a forest service campground before. It was nice and I hope that will become a standard at all forest service campgrounds.
The countryside is green and lush. Diary, cattle, goats, and sheep are everywhere. We started seeing long barn structures. We believe these may be chicken producers but we weren’t interested in finding out. Sometimes its best not to know.
We crossed into Virginia around noontime and found Harrisonburg to be a wonderfully clean and modern city. Our first stop was the Costco for gas and to pickup groceries for our stay in Shenandoah. The price of gasoline was a surprising $2.999. In Ohio the price had ranged from $3.30 to $3.40. This was especially nice since the Roadtrek’s tank was nearing empty and took 29.3 gallons to fill.
We found all the stores we needed within 1/2-mile of the Costco. We replenished our camping money stash at the local Bank of America, bought groceries at the Kroger grocery store, and exchanged the microwave we bought a few days ago at the Walmart. There was even a Panera Bakery for lunch and WiFi access.
Shenandoah National Park is only 50-miles from Harrisonburg. Of course, our GPS tried to route us via a short cut that involved fire roads. We quickly changed our route and arrived at the Loft Campground around 2pm.
We did laundry at the camp store Laundromat. While the laundry was doing its thing, we toured the camp store and shared a pint of very good vanilla ice cream. We discovered one reason gas price was so low in Virginia is that the sales tax rate is only 2.5%.
The Loft campground is located at the very top of Loft Mountain. The mountaintop is not as green and lush as we found in the Shenandoah Valley. The trees appear broken and bent by snow, ice, and storms. One benefit of being so high is that we can pick up television station from many regions including Washington DC which is 100 miles away. We were able to watch the NBC nightly news from stations located in 3 different places.
