Before I get into the new stuff, I have an interesting update to my last post. As you’ll recall, we visited Winston Salem where RJ Reynolds tobacco company is headquartered. When he worked for Videk (a spinoff/subsidiary of Kodak), my Dad received a patent for a “Cigarette Package Inspection Indexing Wheel” that he designed, and my brother reminded me that the product was designed for RJR…so, undoubtedly, my Dad had visited Winston Salem at some point, and likely multiple times, while working on this project in the late 1980s. The purpose of the inspection wheel was to see inside the package, to ensure that all of the cigarettes were intact and customers would not find them bent, broken, etc. when they opened the package. So, a more personal connection to Winston Salem!

We started the week with a hop-on/hop-off trolley tour of Asheville. We like to do these when we visit cities we’re not familiar with, to get an overview of the highlights. The hop-on/hop-off portion was less feasible, however, because it’s off-season here and the trolleys were only running once an hour – so if you got off somewhere, you had to be there for at least an hour, and the day just isn’t long enough to hop off at several stops and stay there for an hour each. So, we decided to just take the full tour, staying on the trolley, which lasted about 90 minutes. We had a really good tour guide; he has lived in Asheville for most of his life and had lots of interesting stories and history to share. There is some fabulous architecture throughout the city, and it has a thriving arts community – the trolley took us past one of the most beautiful and unique hotels, the Omni Park Grove (sorry, I couldn’t get any photos!), as well as some amazing homes. Many were designed by the same architect as The Biltmore. (We are not visiting The Biltmore on this trip; we were just there in September 2021).

After we finished the tour, we headed back into the heart of downtown Asheville to check out some of the places we saw on the tour. We started with “Woolworth Walk” – an original FW Woolworth store has been converted into an arts & crafts emporium with the work of over 150 local artists – really creative re-use of a cool old building. Plus, there’s an operating soda fountain built to resemble the original Woolworth lunch counter and serving food and ice cream sodas!

We wandered over to the S&W Cafeteria, a gorgeous art deco building. S&W Cafeteria was a chain and the owners chose Asheville to showcase their brand with this amazing building. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, and is now a food hall with several restaurants operating inside.

Grove Arcade was our next stop. The building was originally intended to have a 14-story tower on top of it, but only the base was actually built. Even so, it is the largest building in the region (the Biltmore could fit inside with about 96,000 sq. ft. to spare). After being government-owned for many years, the Arcade was restored and reopened in 2002. It is simply beautiful inside, with all of the natural light, architectural details, and iron work…and the outside is pretty spectacular, too!

And the interior…

Tuesday morning, we took a short drive to the neighboring town of Black Mountain – very cute little town full of shops. We wandered in and out of a few of them, and then headed over to Lake Tomahawk where there is a really nice trail around the lake, and the scenery isn’t too bad, either!

For the afternoon, we decided to trek to Pisgah National Forest, about an hour SW of Asheville, to chase some waterfalls. First stop was Looking Glass Falls – a beautiful waterfall surrounded by rocky cliffs. And, it’s literally next to the road, so no crazy long hikes to get to it!

From there, we went to neighboring DuPont State Forest, to Hooker Falls. It’s short (only about 12 feet high) but wide. It’s one of several waterfalls in the area, but it’s the only one that we were willing to hike to (the other hikes were much longer and more challenging!). North Carolina definitely has its fair share of beautiful waterfalls, but Ithaca NY is still at the top of the list for me!

One of the things we’ve noticed in the Asheville area is the abundance of rhododendron bushes…they are EVERYWHERE! I can only imagine what it will look like in June when they are all in bloom! Must be amazing!

On Thursday, St. Patrick’s Day, we went back into downtown Asheville. It was hopping – definitely lots of people out enjoying the holiday! We went in some of the shops, including Mast General Store that has several locations around Western NC – really nice variety of items. We attempted to visit the Pinball Museum but there was a 90-minute wait to get in – they call it a museum, but you pay $15 to play all day on the classic pinball and arcade games. Seems more like an arcade to me! Anyway, it’s VERY popular as evidenced by the long wait on a beautiful Thursday afternoon when you’d expect people to be outside, not inside! Oh well. We made ourselves feel better by having ice cream at the soda fountain at Woolworth Walk!

Friday morning was spent at a laundromat doing what will hopefully be our last loads of laundry until we return home! We had a really interesting afternoon on a tour of Citizen Vinyl, a multi-use facility in downtown Asheville that started as home to the local newspaper, the Asheville Citizen-Times, and radio station WWNC (Wonderful Western North Carolina). The building itself is beautiful – built in the late 30s, it’s considered “Art Moderne”, full of high ceilings, curved railings, and 20,000 glass blocks to provide lots of natural light.

In 2019, Citizen Vinyl moved in and took over a portion of the building to house a vinyl record pressing plant, a café, record store, and analog recording studio. Our tour included the recording studio which is housed in the former radio station studio, complete with reel-to-reel machine to allow conversion from analog to digital. From there, we went to the vinyl record pressing plant. It’s one of about 30 in the country, and probably the smallest, with just two machines. It was fascinating to see the vinyl “pucks” that go into a machine, are pressed by the thin metal “mother” and “father” (basically, negatives of side A and side B) to create the tracks, and the record that is then trimmed and stacked. I had no idea how records were made, nor had I ever really thought about it, and now I’ve seen it in action! The tour guide was explaining that, with the resurgence of vinyl popularity, there is not nearly enough capacity for all the demand to press vinyl records…so if anyone is looking for a business venture, buy a few of these machines for a few hundred grand each, and the record industry will flock to you!

It’s clearly the weekend again…by 8pm Friday night, the campground was PACKED! I guess with spring starting this weekend, everyone is ready to start their camping season down here.