'em up with a highway."

"Not a bad idea," chorused the friends, and they took another round of
mint juleps to celebrate the birth of a thought.

"Ideas grow and thoughts travel fast," Fiddling Bob's nephew remarked
some years later when setting out on a cross-country journey. "The
Park-to-Park Highway grows annually and this Skyline Drive, which is a
part of the plan, is one of the most alluring of all modern roads."
Starting at Front Royal, the northern entrance to the Shenandoah Valley
Park, it continues to Rockfish Gap near Waynesboro on the south, a
distance of 107 miles. It is a broad mountain highway following the
crest of the Blue Ridge, invading a world that was remote and known only
to mountain folk. Today over its smooth, paved surface cars climb
quickly to airy heights from which may be viewed innumerable vistas of
the Piedmont plateau and the Shenandoah Valley. At strategic points
parking overlooks have been constructed, from which are seen tumbling
waterfalls, deep and narrow canyons, cool shady forests, open meadows,
and wild flowers of every shade and hue throughout the summer. Autumn
presents a boundless riot of color and winter a snowy, sparkling blanket
pierced by tall green pines.

The Skyline Drive links with the Blue Ridge Parkway at Rockfish Gap
which will at last connect the Shenandoah National Park with the Great
Smoky Mountain National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee.

"In case you don't know," Fiddling Bob's nephew likes to remind a
stranger, "Shenandoah Valley Park was presented by Virginians to the
nation in 1935 and more than three million dollars have been spent on
the Skyline Drive alone--a drive that hasn't a parallel in America.
Through this wilderness the Father of his Country once trudged on foot
as a surveyor and looked down upon the beauty of the Shenandoah Valley
from the lofty peaks of the Blue Ridge. His was the task to survey lands
for the oncoming settlers. He had no moment to explore under the earth.
That was the task of later men. Today for good measure, after you have
beheld the breathtaking beauty from the heights, just travel seven
eighths of a mile from Front Royal to the Skyline Caverns where you'll
see the most unusual cave flowers that man has ever looked upon.
Why"--Fiddling Bob's nephew puffs vehemently on his corn-cob pipe--"do
you know that Dr. Holden, he's professor of Geology at VPI, says these
Hellicitites, that's what he calls 'em, 'these weird, fantast