Blue Ridge Parkway

At 469 miles long, the Blue Ridge Parkway is a scenic drive connecting the Great Smoky Mountain National Park at its southern end with Shenandoah National Park in the north. The parkway runs through the Appalachian Mountains, passing through two states (North Carolina and Virginia), one Indian reservation (Cherokee), four national forests and 26 tunnels, and reaches 6,053 feet in elevation at its highest point.

It's the most visited park in all of the United States National Park Service and is so biologically diverse that it contains more species of trees than all of Europe. That's right. 

Construction of the parkway began in 1935 as a post-Depression era stimulus project and finished 52 years later with the completion and dedication of the Linn Cove Viaduct in 1987.

We'd driven along parts of the parkway about half a dozen times before, and last year I got the idea in my head that it would be great to drive it from end to end. So that's exactly what we did, covering about 80–100 miles per day, with a speed limit of 35 mph and a one lane road. It was slow going, but worth the effort.

The only challenge we faced was a faulty GPS — to go with our broken car and camera. Not an ideal turn of events when you're on a road trip, but things really don't seem to be working out for us so far, do they?