SO, ASHEVILLE

With one day left it and four hours to Raleigh that we didn’t want to drive the next morning we had to make a hard decision to leave today for Winston-Salem, which seemed like a good halfway point. We still needed to see some more stuff and Cara had read about a rock slide about an hour away that we thought we could visit on the way out.

We found the downtown YMCA, delightfully free of inspirational materials and with a rather nice indoor pool that was typically underused. The one other lap swimmer in the pool took some time to talk to us, explaining she’d moved there recently from Indianapolis and found the lack of outdoor swimming in the area a bit daunting but that overall she really loved living there even if it was hard to make a living. That seemed to be the obvious concern about moving to a small town, making a living. The median income for Asheville is rather small, somewhere in the 24K region, which seems a bit harsh if you were working on a career in some kind of field. In my line of work I can freelance and usually get enough contract jobs to do fine, but you never know. The whole idea of living somewhere like this would be to live within your means, something I’m pretty familiar with these days.

After some coffee we heading out on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the direct route to the Smokey Mountains National Park we’d driven through earlier. As we climbed further into the hills the weather started to cloud over and get increasingly chilly, dropping a good twenty degrees from the 80s we’d just left in town. Like most of this area, it’s incredibly lush and fertile and some of the loveliest country I’ve seen outside of the Northwest. In less that an hour you can be hiking in this, which is a big plus for wherever I want to live, the NYC proximity thing is a little ridiculous in regards to getting out and away.

Passing through tunnels on a road with little traffic we started to drive through actual cloud cover around 5,000 feet when it started to rain, soon reaching the summit of the mountains at around 6,000 feet. Somehow we’d missed the turnout for the rock slide, which was just as well since we would have frozen our asses off. I had to take a leak so we stopped in one of the many trailhead lots that lined the road and I darted off into the woods immediately mesmerized by the stillness of the forest and the sound of heavy rain falling through the canopy. I miss this.

Back in town we had a delicious southern-style dinner the Tupelo Honey Cafe, a place we wanted to eat breakfast but couldn’t endure the long wait. This place is so popular it’s open until 3am on Friday and Saturday. The fried chicken with home-made gravy, mashed sweet potatoes, fried okra and fried green tomatoes was to die for.