Overlanding Loop A 6-day Adventure
It doesn’t matter if we are staying for a day, week, or a month, we must pre-plan our trip to know the route, campsites, and location, so that we can manage food and gas accordingly. There are many social media groups and other resources that can help us with our pre-planning. The first thing that we try to determine is which area we would like to explore and which sites we would like to visit on the way. The most recent trip that we made was a 6-day trek that started on Saturday morning and ended on Thursday. We needed to reach Uwharrie National Forest, NC, by Wednesday afternoon, so there was plenty of time to do some hiking on this journey. I prefer to plan my route on a laptop and then sync it with mobile phones and iPads. GAIA GPS is a preferred application. However, we also had a paper map. For this trip, we used some already established routes, and fortunately, they had several waypoints for gas stations and a few campsites on the way. If you want to find campsites, then you can use websites like Freecampsites.net and the iOverlander app. We prefer to use free sites in the forest; however, we knew that you would need to spend some money, so we ended up spending it on a one-night cabin. Next, we enlisted the food that we wanted for each meal on our way. We made this list to make things easier 24
for us. It helped us to figure out what we had in our home and what we needed to purchase from the grocery store. DAY 1: We headed out on Saturday morning with decent weather and the 4Runner packed up with most of the necessities for our 6-day adventure. The preplanned route took us West on Rt 460 and over the Blue Ridge Parkway, VA. From there we made a quick stop in Buchanan to walk on the Swinging Bridge and then over to Roaring Run Furnace to hike to the Falls. We got a bit of rain during the hike and only ran into 4 other groups of people during the short hike. After that we followed the preestablished route south west past the Pines Campground. We were running out of daylight, so we skipped Tub Run
