By William Silveira
Marylin and I were looking over our newspapers one Sunday in September when we came across and article by Christopher Reynolds in the September 11 travel section of the Los Angeles Times. The article, “You’ll Want to Slow Down,” was part of a “Celebrating Our National Parks” series that the Times had been running. The article ran to three pages, with large color photographs. It recounted the author’s travels on the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge Parkways in 2015. The sum of the article, plus our memory of a short glimpse of a piece of the Blue Ridge Parkway during a visit to North Carolina about 17 years ago, plus my 70,000 unused points on Southwest Airlines’s customer rewards program was all the incentive we needed. We started planning immediately.
