Rabbit Hole Road Trip: McDowell County

We spent a Saturday rolling around the mountains. Here's the itinerary for a quick trip with a waterfall, an orchard, an old train station, and a turnkey campsite.

Earlier this summer, a Rabbit Hole reader asked me about an out-of-the-way or little-known place that I was particularly fond of. I’ve always had a hard time picking the best this or my favorite that. Hence, this was my advice for do-it-yourself-exploring:

The trick is to make these low-stakes quick excursions close to wherever you were already going. If you show up and it sucks, you can keep going. If you like it, you can stay or remember to go back.

That was my plan last weekend, when the family wanted to go camping before school started up. So, my wife and I looked for a relatively inexpensive place to spend a night in the mountains, then I went to work to find some small but memorable things to do nearby. Here was our itinerary: