For my birthday this year, Danny gave me something that I’ve been dying for!  His idea was to take me to the airport on the Friday after my birthday (Dec 2) and let me choose any place to go for the weekend. Not bad, eh? We both love to travel and we were due for a weekend outside of Boston. It sounds much more exiting to choose a place right at the airport, but I did want to plan a little so we got our plane tickets on Thursday evening to fly out to Asheville, NC on Friday night.

I wanted to go somewhere in the southeast because I’ve never been and I am fascinated by southern culture. I wanted to eat boiled peanuts, hear people say “y’all” and experience the “southern hospitality” I’ve heard so much about.  Here is a teaser image from our weekend!

Us:

Here are some of the highlights from downtown Asheville.  I’ll try to explain most of them, as Asheville is so very unique!

First, there was a cute soap shop that sold fortune cookie shaped soaps in about 10 different scents.  The cat is to symbolize the catwalk where delivery trucks needed to go to bring goods to the shops in the old days.  The purple wall and monk was by a new Belgian beer place (yum!).  There was a spice shop that sold maybe 40 different kinds of salt, and in the photo you see 4 or so different kinds of smoked paprika.  Of course I had to snap a picture of Boston Way in Biltmore Village and a sign of the Biltmore Estate.  We didn’t go here because they charge $60 a person just to drive up to it.  No thanks!

This place was my favorite in all of Asheville!  It was a double decker buss/coffee shop!  It is called “Double D’s” and I highly recommend a visit to anyone passing through.  They even had a live musician playing on the top floor!  How awesome are the tables?

After we had seen the sights of Asheville, we wanted to go see some of the nature around town.  We headed to Chimney Rock to climb to the top and work off some of those calories consumed in town.   All of these photos were taken in Chimney Rock, NC.

All in all we loved Asheville. The town was about 10 years in the future as far as being environmentally friendly. Everything seemed to run off solar panels and there were recycle bins of all types all over downtown. Tons of coffee shops to just hang out and not a Starbucks in sight! All of the shops had signs on them saying “locally made here in Asheville” and all of the restaurants had the same. There was live music happening in every pub on Saturday night which is something we’re not used to here in Boston, or they charge you $20 to get in.  We just roamed the streets and found ourselves in and out of places at night. “DW” from Tupelo Honey Cafe helped us find things to do because we went to Asheville with zero plans and no knowledge of the city. He was great!  Also, Tupelo Honey Cafe’s food was so good, I highly recommend it. Even the police officers were friendly, asking how we were doing as we walked on by.  In Boston most of the time I am scared to look a police officer in the eye for fear they will start yelling at me for no reason like they typically do.

I leave you with one last photo. As we drove back to Charlotte to catch our flight back to Boston Danny saw this house on a hill and immediately pulled over because he knew that I would love it. What do you think?

As always, thank you for reading!

xo