National Park Road Trips: Congaree
Because of the remote location of most of the U.S. national parks, visiting them usually requires a road trip, even if your starting point is the airport closest to the park. As I have visited all 63 national parks, I have gone on many road trips that have taken me to fascinating places on the way to or from the national parks — proving the accuracy of the cliché that it’s the journey, not the destination. (See here for a detailed post about my quest to visit all the parks.) Over the coming days, I will publish a series of short posts on some of my more memorable national park road trips. Hopefully they will encourage you to use a physical map when planning your next trip to a national park, rather than just finding the shortest route on Google Maps.
I visited Congaree National Park twice, first with my son Jeremy in July 2018; then again with Jeremy and my wife Leesa in December 2025.
In 2018, Jeremy and I flew from our home near Washington DC to Charlotte, North Carolina, then drove to Columbia, South Carolina. The next day we visited Congaree, which is only a 45-minute drive from Columbia. The park preserves the largest tract of old growth bottomland hardwood forest left on the East Coast. Basically, it’s a forest in the swampy floodplain of the Congaree River. It contains the tallest examples of 15 species of trees, including the loblolly pine, the sweetgum, and the American Elm, but that was a bit lost on us. We walked along the two-and-a-half mile boardwalk, and had trouble distinguishing the different kinds of trees. Most noteworthy were the cypress trees, which had “knees” — phallic-shaped protrusions that were part of their root systems — sticking above the ground. In places, the forest had a primeval feel and we could imagine dinosaurs suddenly appearing.
As always, we found other points of interest. In Columbia, we visited the State House (with a statue of Strom Thurmond), the “horseshoe” on the campus of the University of South Carolina, the Columbia Canal, and the South Carolina State Museum. On the drive back to Charlotte, we visited King’s Mountain National Military Park, a Revolutionary War battlefield. We had the Park to ourselves, and I enjoyed learning about the War in the Carolinas. My attention previously was focused much more on the history of the Revolutionary War in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. We proceeded to the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden, and then on to the NASCAR Museum in Charlotte, NC. I knew nothing about NASCAR racing, so I was fascinated to be exposed to the culture and technology. The museum had numerous simulations. Jeremy and I did pretty well changing a tire and refueling a stock-car in a pit-stop. We fared much more poorly in a race simulation with other visitors; Jeremy and I finished in last place.
In December 2025, I visited Congaree again, now with Leesa and Jeremy. This time we drove the whole way from Washington DC. I didn’t make the eight-hour drive to Congaree because I wanted to experience it a second time. Rather, by then, Leesa had decided to visit all the national parks, so she needed to catch up and go to the ones I had seen without her.
We drove down on Christmas eve, and visited Congaree on Christmas day. As when I saw it with Jeremy, Congaree was underwhelming. We had a nice stroll on the boardwalk, and enjoyed the winter sun shining down us on unblocked by the leafless trees, but it was not particularly memorable. I learned later that canoe concessions operated tours along Cedar Creek all year long, which would have been fun to do, but I had wrongly assumed that they closed for the winter.
On the way back from South Carolina, we saw the Christmas light show at the Charlotte, Motor Speedway. We were able to drive on the track, through the infield, and under the grandstand, which was thrilling. We stopped in Winston-Salem, where we visited the historic Old Salem Historic District, home to a Moravian community in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I had never heard of Old Salem, so was fascinated to learn this slice of history. We also visited the Revolutionary War Guildford Courthouse National Military Park and the Wake Forest University Campus.
The next day we explored the Reynolda House Museum of American Art, which had an interesting exhibit on Camel cigarettes, manufactured by the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company. We continued on to Hanging Rock State Park, where we hiked up to Hanging Rock with its stunning views of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The following day, we visited the sprawling campus of Virginia Tech, the Roanoke Star, the Booker T. Washington National Memorial, the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford VA, and Thomas Jefferson’s retreat in Poplar Forest, near Lynchburg. (It didn’t seem like that busy a day at the time!)
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On the last day of the road trip, we hoped to drive along the Skyline Parkway in Shenandoah National Park, but the National Park Service had closed the Parkway because the winds were too strong. Although we had been to Shenandoah National Park several times (it’s only a couple of hours from Washington DC), we couldn’t find any photos of it, and Leesa was assembling a photo album of our National Park quest, with one page for each park. We wanted to take some pictures along Skyline Drive, but had to make do with photos of us standing near the entrance sign.
