2005-07-20 - 8:12 a.m.

It has been a week since the last update. I said right before the wedding that I didn’t anticipate keeping this thing going. I thought that would be by choice, but it has been out of necessity of other more pressing issues.

I left off at Monday night. Tuesday morning, we got up and there was just one other guest at the B&B. She struck me as a very strange woman; she didn’t share a single fact about herself other than her name and that she was from Florida. She was just strange.

After breakfast, my dearest napped while I read a graphic novel; we were waiting for 10:30am when a traditional Japanese bathhouse was set to be open. We wanted to call and schedule massages and a bath. 10:30 came, we called, and to our dismay, learned that they were behind schedule and were not open to the public for another 10 days! We were really bummed, but at that point, we couldn’t linger anymore in the room, the day was wasting.

We headed into Asheville, sort of with a plan, but not really. I was navigating, and we came upon a left lane exit, and I keep telling my dearest “Move right, move right, this is an exit, move right.” He never did get over and we got off on an exit into a strange part of town. We got turned back around, but were sort of lost. We could see where we were on the map, but couldn’t figure out how to get back to where we were heading, so we took an alternate route. We came to Route 25 (the same route we were originally looking for) but we were north of the city, so we just decided to take 25 south towards Biltmore Village and the Mansion.

However, it wasn’t so straight forward, and within a couple of turns, we were thoroughly lost, only to find St. Lawrence’s Basilica directly in front of us. I had never been in to a basilica before, and it was a thing to behold. Very European, very beautiful. The Marian shrine was particularly stunning, but honestly, the entire place was amazing. We stayed for the 12:15 mass which was nice.

After the mass ended, we got on the road again to find the Chamber of Commerce/Visitors Center directly ahead about 2 blocks up. We were saved. We went in, got two fabulous maps of Downtown Asheville, picked up brochures, got information about Chimney Rock, wandered around, and then got back on the road, this time, knowing where we were, where we were going, and the only question was which place would we stop to eat at.

We had a list of recommendations from a local friend, so we picked the one on the road we were traveling down anyway. It was a pub that specialized in beer from local microbreweries. We each got a drink, ordered a white pizza with feta cheese, and had a blast. The food was great, the beer was great. The service was so-so but we had been warned of that in advance.

After lunch, it was time to get on down to Biltmore. We wanted to do a RoofTop tour and the wineries and that was it. As it turned out, you couldn’t just get the rooftop tour, we had to spend $80 on tickets for the two of us, and the roof top tour tickets were an extra $15 a piece. We opted to go ahead and get the regular tickets, but decided later to skip the roof top tour since it was stuff we had seen already anyway on our last trip and being set back another $30 wasn’t all that appealing. I did go in to the confectioners shop and buy $10 worth of candies and fudge for us. Sadly, my fudge disappeared and I never did get to eat it.

Into the house for a few minutes. I sat on the balcony facing Pisgah Mountain to take in the view for a while and watched a thunderstorm roll over the mountains heading towards us. We went to see the 15th century tapestries, but the lights in the room were off and it was too dark to really see anything. Somewhat disappointed with that, we headed back outside and towards the rose garden.

The rose garden was wonderful of course. There were several 2006 roses out and I took pictures of roses that impressed me for future reference. The saddest thing was my favorite rose that I saw there; a pure white floribunda, had no name tag. I took pictures, but have no idea to this day what the name of that rose was. It was a wonderful, pure white (which I find to be fairly rare) rose though.

The skies opened up while I was in the rose garden, but I really didn’t care. It had been so unmercifully hot that the rain storm was welcome. It didn’t really bring down the temperatures, but the steam coming off the tarmac in some areas was really impressive. I felt like I was in a rice cooker.

We headed up to the historic horse barn, expecting to see horses, but apparently, they don’t keep horses in the horse barn. I was annoyed by this, and being tired now, I went back to the van while my dearest walked over to the historic farm (where they did keep horses). We drove back to the winery, where unlike the last time I was there, I was old enough for the tasting this time. I tasted about 8 different wines, liked some, didn’t like most, and went to the shop afterwards to pick up 3 bottles of wine (you received a small discount for buying 3 or more).

We were both pretty tired at this point, and it was 5:30pm. We considered our routes home and found we were very close to the Blue Ridge Parkway (turned out we weren’t THAT close) and so we opted to take the hour long scenic route. It ended up taking just shy of two hours, but we made several stops at some of the very beautiful scenic overlooks. Many pictures were taken, and we stopped in and got information at the Pisgah Inn; a park run hotel that sits right up on top of Mount Pisgah. It was truly beautiful up there and the prices were reasonable. I would love to go and stay in that inn for a long weekend.

We continued on down the mountain, getting off the parkway at 276, heading back down towards Brevard. It was after 7pm when we got to the intersection of 276 and 64, so we pulled into Hawg Wild’s for some long anticipated BBQ. Sadly, it wasn’t all that spectacular; it was good enough but not the stellar stuff that I had been hoping for.

Dinner was over soon enough and we headed back to the B&B. I am sure I have written down how we spent the rest of our evening, but I cant remember off the top of my head at the moment. I believe it was more comic book time; in fact, I remember now that I read Batman: Year One in bed while my husband read The Long Halloween on the couch.

Sleep came early in anticipation of breakfast at 8:30 and then beginning the trip home.

Day 3, and the last full day in Brevard came to an end.

previous - next