Asheville, NC

A nice ride along the upper Blue Ridge Parkway - overcast, no snow, fall colors fading but pretty views, very few cars - and we pulled into Mama Gertie's Campground outside Asheville. This part of North Carolina is absolutely beautiful this time of year, even though the foliage isn't as spectacular as it must have been a few weeks ago.

Asheville was one of several cities in America that we targeted before our trip as a possible future place to live, if we ever left Santa Cruz. It's in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, so it doesn't get as hot in the summer as most of the south. It has the reputation of being extremely liberal compared to most of the old South. There are several colleges there, and an impressive concert schedule. It sounded promising.

We began by taking a trolley tour of the city. Our driver was a foghorn-voice fellow whose night job is bass player in a bluegrass band. The first place we visited was Montford, an elegant big money neighborhood with mansions and estates everywhere, several magnificent hotels, and a fascinating history.

Thomas Wolfe grew up there and wrote his great book Look Homeward Angel about life in the area. It is said that half the citizens were outraged at how they were depicted, and the other half were disappointed that they weren't included. There's a big Thomas Wolfe museum in Montford.

The trolley took us by Highland Hospital. F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife Zelda died there in 1948 when the psychiatric hospital in which she was confined burned to the ground.

We passed the Montford house in which William Jennings Bryan, the prosecutor in the Scopes Monkey trial, lived. Nancy asked our tour guide if evolution is taught in the schools locally. He laughed and said, yes, of course – but that creationism is also a part of the curriculum.

Downtown Asheville has some nice neighborhoods and a lot of interesting restaurants. We hopped off and had sandwiches at Paul Boudreaux's Bar-B-Que for lunch. Our waiter was part of a band that had played a couple of times at Moe's Alley in Santa Cruz. Almost every day on our trip we've encountered somebody who has been to Santa Cruz and remembers it fondly.

Another Asheville neighborhood is Biltmore Village, a community that grew up near the famous Biltmore Estate, built by George Vanderbilt in 1895, the largest private residence in the US, an attraction that we planned to visit during our stay. That concluded our trolley tour. It was a good introduction to Asheville.

Back at Mama Gertie's campground, with time pressure off, Nancy and I enjoyed wandering among the RV's and talking with our fellow travelers, especially those with dogs. I don't know if it was the beauty of the campground or the nice weather or the southern ambiance or simply our more relaxed outlook, but we found ourselves making friends more easily than elsewhere. We went to a pizza joint with an older (read, our age) couple from Texas – he a former park ranger, and we had a younger couple (by a few years) – he a retired HP programmer - over for appetizers and chocolate martinis and talk deep into the night.   Nancy and I are sliding comfortably into the trailer park lifestyle.  My southern accent is coming back, y'all.