Asheville, NC

This is the beginning of our exploration of North Carolina. Our first day in Asheville we hit the farmers market downtown. It was a couple of blocks long with all kinds of pastries, cheese, flowers, nuts and produce. We got some delicious croissants and an almond twist from the French Broad Bakery- named after the French Broad River (Jerry and I have had a lot of fun with the name). We drove around Asheville, and outlying areas looking at lots. We didn’t see anything that we liked (within our price range), but we did find the Bigfoot Festival! Unfortunately we couldn’t find parking, so we just drove by and marveled at the crowds.

The dogwood trees are blooming everywhere- they are beautiful!

The next day we went to open houses. We identified 9 to visit, but only went into 5. We discovered that Asheville is expensive! We saw one house that was HORRIBLE (dirty, outdated and in need of repair and updating) for $600,000, another in a bad area of town for $680,000, a very nice one (with a remodeled main bedroom/bath that would have to be ripped out because it looked like a dark dungeon) for $900,000, an updated older home (where they cut a lot of corners and it had tiny rooms) for $599,000 and a beautiful 2-story plus basement and a huge park-like yard for $749,000. So we figure Asheville is a little (or a lot) out of our price range!

The next day we drove a part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. This road is 469 miles, and goes from Afton, VA to Cherokee NC, along the ridge of the southern and central Appalachian Mountains. We drove just over 100 miles on it. This is a must do if you are anywhere near the Blue Ridge Parkway- even if you can just drive a small part, like we did.

There are lots of lookouts along the way, and we stopped at a few of them.

There was a bike ride going on, but luckily they were all going the other way! I felt bad for the riders as we watched them struggle up the mountain!

We took a short hike in Craggy Gardens, which is full of rhododendrons, but we were a little early and they weren’t blooming yet, and another short hike and saw this river:

And then on to this waterfall:

It isn’t very high, but it made up for it in beauty! And the rocks in the viewing area were very cool:

You can see how they were worn by water!

We stopped in Boone for dinner on the way back to the campground, and I had another great meal of shrimp and grits- who knew they would be so delicious?!? Boone is apparently a tourist destination for skiers and snow-boarders, and there were a lot of hotels, restaurants and equipment rental places!

We went by Appalachian State University, which is in Boone- a beautiful campus: