Virtually every Saturday, my girlfriend and I make the hour-and-change drive to Shenandoah National Park from DC’s suburbs, where we rent a townhouse apartment with three other cash-strapped graduate students. She and I each went half in on the $80 it costs to buy an annual national park pass and have used it so many times that our trips now feel free. A routine visit to our favorite refuge looks like this: we do a six to eight-mile hike; we drive down Skyline Drive; we eat dinner at the lodge in Big Meadows (My “treat” is a craft beer. Hers is blackberry ice cream pie); we catch the sunset.