So first of all, I did not get the name wrong. There is a Natural Bridge State Park, as well. This just isn’t it! This tunnel has train tracks going through it. And on the third Saturday in July, every year, you can actually walk the tracks. Talk about bucket list things!
To get here, we had to go through Tennessee. We spent two hours at the Tennessee Welcome Center, sucking up all the internet we could find before heading back into the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. From the entrance of the park to the campground is about half a mile of first gear hills. This, of course, means that everything in the park is seriously downhill, and conversely, returning to the campground is seriously uphill. But the elevation has given us some internet. We took a short hike to an overlook above the tunnel before heading back for Curried Chicken over rice and internet.
The piece de resistance of the park is the TUNNEL. During the summer you can take a chair lift down to the tunnel entrance, but that’s not really hiking. As we got back to the overlook we had stopped at, we could hear the train whistle, so we got to see the train passing through the tunnel. Forgive us, but we kinda got a rush out of it. There a big lights to to shine on the canyon walls and on the tunnel. Apparently, in non-COVID times, they have shindig at Christmas. Well that made to Deb’s bucket list.
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