Blue Ridge Parkway 2 road trips Lonely Planet | 9781788684569

You won't find one stoplight on the entire Blue Ridge Parkway, which traverses the southern Appalachians from Virginia's Shenandoah National Park at Mile 0 to North Carolina's Great Smokey Mountains National Park at Mile 469. Commissioned by President Franklin D Roosevelt as a Great Depression-era publicworks project, it's one of America's classic drives. North Carolina's piece of the parkway twists and turns for 262 miles of killer mountain vistas.