Sights, Signs, Flavors: Asheville, NC
A vibrant and interesting city!
In our eagerness to leave our last campground, we realized after the fact that we had left the rubber mats we put down on the gravel to level the van. Arg… The place was cursed in many ways.
Because our reservations did not align, we had to spend one night in a big corporate campground, one of those find-us-anywhere-join-our-membership ones. It was aight; nothing particularly bad about the way they run their campgrounds, I suppose, although I didn’t find anything particularly great that made me want to sign up for their program.
The lady in the office first assigned us to a site with 50 amps, but when I mentioned we needed 30 amps instead, she looked in her book a while, scratched her head, and then grandly declared that we could set up camp in site C13. We were lucky, she declared, since it was a highly requested site. She spun a good tale: the spot was at the end of the lake and fairly isolated, so her story seemed plausible. It didn’t hit me until after we were settled that it would be a hike to go to the bathroom, especially if nature called us at 2 am. To make matters more comfortable — roll eyes — it was raining steadily, which meant that our accommodations felt even more cramped because we had to keep our bikes inside the van. Perhaps we should add something like those long metal grab bars that run the length of a city bus; we would then just have to dangle ourselves above all the stuff we have in the aisle.
We finally checked in at our hotel in downtown Asheville and took the equivalent of whatever the opposite of Navy showers are.
An exploratory walk along the breadth and length of downtown Asheville took just a couple of hours: its streets were bustling with young people (likely students from the UNC Asheville campus in town, all covered in tats. Wait, should I get one too?), quirky artists’ cooperatives, and breweries that served creative beers and good food.
On Monday, we walked to the River Arts District by the French Broad River. It’s clear that the area is developing and gentrifying rapidly — cranes and construction chaos everywhere. Along the river sat large buildings that looked like factories in their previous lives, perhaps manufacturing of industrial parts; now they were covered in artsy graffiti and had been taken over as artist studious in all kinds of media: pottery, textiles, woodworking, glass. N. and I walked through their wares — some to our taste, others not, but all interesting — without being able to buy anything. “Van” is a three-letter word and ours has the space to match. We did however buy things in our head and we fantasy-decorated our imaginary house with some of the more beautiful pieces from the Foundation Woodworks and Lexington Glassworks.
We walked a total of seven miles, but I started to feel my shin splints acting up in a way that they had not when we had to hike those blasted 12 miles in Charlie’s Bunion. Beware of city walking in unrelenting and unforgiving concrete.
One of the signs that Asheville is a cosmopolitan city in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains is that we found an artsy, locally owned movie theater where we watched Decision to Leave, the latest film by Korean director Park Chan-wook. I got more of a kick watching that movie in that location than from watching the movie itself.
Asheville is often mentioned in lists that tout, “Top Places to Retire”. I can certainly see the attraction: the city has the vibrancy and excitement; the university adds that spark and energy that comes naturally to young people; restaurants and breweries make eating out exciting adventures; artists in all media offer classes and demonstrations; with mountains all around, getting close to nature is easy.
But it’s not for me. For now, I imagine retiring at our forever home in a bigger city, next to a library, in the same block as a hospital, and definitely above a grocery store, preferably a Wegmans!
We had originally planned to leave for our next destination on Thursday, but Tropical Storm Nicole changed our minds. We checked the weather app and lots of phrases jumped out: “landing as a hurricane”, “storm surges”, “tornado threat”, etc. Because it was forecast to come up the eastern seaboard, we decided it was probably safer to stay in the mountains, waiting for Nicole to come up and lose some of its strength on the way.
So on short notice, I found a campground near Asheville to wait out the storm. Dear neighbors, there is such a thing as a 55+ RV Campground!