We love to visit Shenandoah! Our littles still remember our Tiny House Adventure in Shenandoah and love visiting year round for more mountain adventures! We packed up the Adventure Wagon and headed back to the blue ridge mountains of Shenandoah. This trip we stayed at a farm house near the National Park. It was the perfect home base for our crew with beautiful views from the porch, a refreshing pond and plenty of opportunities to relax AND adventure!
Our first day in the park we went straight to the Cedar Run Trail and hiked the 2 miles down to the falls. It is a 1,556 ft drop in elevation so it is not an easy hike, especially for tiny legs, but our girls did great! Luckily there was a lot to see and explore along the trail to keep them engaged. We saw millipedes, butterflies, mushrooms, flowers, snails, birds, spiders and possible fairy houses. We like to make hiking more about the journey than the destination. We sing song, play silly games (their favorite is where they have to follow one of us as we touch random things along the trail), take breaks after we have seen 10 of something (like mushrooms, butterflies, etc) and make up stories about the things we see (the big rock pile is bear mansion, etc).
The second set of falls are a natural water slide. There is an easy scramble up the rock to a mossy slide into a pool of freezing refreshing water. We had a blast cooling off after a hard hike, having a snack by the water, catching salamanders in the pool and getting pumped up for the 2 miles and 1,556 ft climb up to the parking lot. Our girls are 6, 4 and 3 years old and they were nothing short of rockstars on this hike. It helped that we had food waiting in the truck and promised them treats.
The next day we drove a section of Skyline Drive looking for bears, deer and birds along the way. We took our time, had a picnic lunch, and stopped a lot so we didn’t push our kids with their sore legs to do anything more than enjoy the views.
If you’re planning a trip to Shenandoah National Park we highly recommend stopping by one of the visitors centers and picking up the Hiking Book Value Packet. It was only $10 when we got it, but it’s a great resource for planning. The reception in the area is pretty spotty and we often can’t get any signal (actually a reason I love visiting the area). You can also download the app and make content available offline in the settings.
We also visited the amazing Luray Caverns while we were in town. Check out our review here.
We’ve been making memories and finding adventure around every turn this summer in the mountains! We had so much fun on our trip to New Hampshire last year that we started to think about summers in a new way! The beaches on the Eastern Shore had always been our go to, but there’s too many summer adventures around DC to always go to the same place. You can check out our other Blue Ridge Mountain adventures from our trip to Massanutten Resort earlier this summer.
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