Asheville Trip

Last year, my family and I travelled to Asheville, North Carolina for vacation. We enjoyed ourselves visiting the Biltmore House, travelling along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and even crossing into Tennessee to spend a day at Dollywood.

We decided to make our Blue Ridge Parkway (which cuts right through Asheville) excursion going westward a few miles. The scenery was magnificent and we stopped at some places for picture-taking. We finally stopped at a town called Waynesville, where we were going to have lunch in a restaurant featured in their promotional brochure that we had. Only when we got there, that restaurant had shut down and other places were closed on account of it being Sunday. Finally, we found a very good family restaurant along that downtown strip and ate lunch. We decided that we would use the Interstate to drive back to Asheville. After leaving the downtown parking lot, turning the corner and going down a road a little bit, we saw stretching up and down the street a large number of eating places of the sort you'd see anywhere. And we were worried that we wouldn't find anything!

We went to Dollywood via the Smoky Mountain National Park. Dollywood is a wonderful, laid-back park that has something for everyone. There are musical, comedy, and kiddie shows going on all the time. There is a blacksmith demonstration as well as many craft centers. The rides varied in quality. I did not like the Tennessee Tornado steel roller coaster because it was too rough and pulled on my neck too much. Blazing Fury was a fun little indoor themed ride. The water rides were fine but we had to wait in long lines for those. There was an imposing-looking ride called Timber Tower that was really pretty mild to ride. But the ride that really impressed me was their wooden roller coaster Thunderhead. It combined smoothness with great drops, speed, and turns.

Although Dollywood was a pleasant experience, the drive back from Dollywood was harrowing, even though we took the Interstate back into North Carolina. It was dark and raining hard by the time we crossed over from Tennessee into North Carolina, with my wife driving and me navigating with a map. And, although we were on I-40, the road curved and dipped very treacherously. The visibility was very poor. To make things worse, the road was full of extremely huge semis driving like it was the Daytona Speedway! Just when it looked like we couldn't see our way at all, one of these trucks passed us and shortly thereafter turned off the road. We followed it into a rest stop that we never would have noticed if the semi hadn't led us there. We all got out, walked around, went to the restroom and bought some vending machine items. I looked at the "you are here" map that was posted. It was then that I discovered that we were only halfway through "The Gorge"! Despite that, the rest of the ride back, although difficult, was better. There was a bit of praying going on during that ride!

We toured Biltmore House, too. The four of us used their "headset" tour that really told us details about its history and its rooms we never would have known otherwise. I thought that if Disney ever bought that place they'd put in some of their audio-animatronics ("mechanized people") to make the rooms seem more "alive"!

Asheville is a very pretty town. The people living there should be proud of it. They also have a campus of the University of North Carolina there that we visited. In some parts of Asheville, though, you have to watch where you're walking or else you may suddenly find yourself tumbling down a steep hill!

This trip actually marked the first occasion ever that I flew in an airplane! We flew from Gainesville, Florida to Atlanta and then to Asheville. From all of the horror stories about delays and security check humiliations, I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly the entire experience went. However, I am glad I had gotten some training with thrill rides at nearby theme parks the previous couple of years! The only outstanding problem I noticed anywhere was that, in the Atlanta terminal, the women's restroom always had a long line going way out into the terminal hallway. I hope they alleviated that problem for the sake of the female passengers. The four flights we took on our round trip all were on small Delta planes, not the bigger jets. The people working at the airport and on the planes were all true professionals who went about their job assignments calmly, politely, and confidently. I say this because a few days after we got back home from our trip, news came out that a plane of the same design as ours crashed taking off from Lexington, Kentucky, erupting into fire and killing its passengers. The pilot had taken off on the short runway there that was intended only for small private planes like Cessnas. Both the copilot and the assigned air traffic controller were distracted doing other things at the moment the pilot made his fatal decision to turn down the wrong runway. I looked at my Google Earth satellite shot of the Lexington Airport, and I couldn't fathom how anyone could have made such a stupid mistake. The entire airport had only two runways, and the long one was much longer and more prominent than the short one.

Maybe in the future, the next time I have the opportunity to fly, I'll just blow over that Lexington accident as a statistical fluke. But for now I'll just stick with my thrill rides. Or just watch my DVD of Airplane!