Next up after Tennessee: North Carolina. En route to Asheville NC (so many villes!), we stayed overnight at a Harvest Host – Paint Rock Farm. Which had nothing to do with painting rocks or any other type of art and all to do with hemp-related products.
According to Wikipedia, hemp is a variety of the cannabis plant species grown specifically for the industrial uses of its derived products. At most of our other Harvest Hosts, we generally buy something. A bottle of wine for example, or in the case of Stoneyard distillery, as much of their coffee liqueur and horchata cocktails as we can fit in the truck. Offered for sale at Paint Rock was a rather paltry selection of CBD-related products, some smokes and t-shirts. On this one, we politely declined and gave a donation instead.
The single track, steep incline road to make it up to Paint Rock was a bit hairy but it was so worth it for the gorgeous setting and views.
Asheville, NC
One of the main attractions in Asheville is the Biltmore estate, the largest private residence in the US with 255 rooms and French chateau-inspired architecture. All this set amongst 8,000 acres of grounds, which I was more interested in than the house, but it’s all or nothing in terms of entry fee. Given the cheapest ticket was $84 per person (up to $304pp for a custom two hour tour, including complimentary parking), I figured I’ve seen enough stately homes in my time to skip this one.
According to our research, Asheville boasts the largest number of breweries per capita of any city in the US. And would you believe it, we were there for a week and only went to three of them.
Our 2020 COVID friend had a hand in dumbing down our Asheville brewery experience. Outside seating and reduced capacity I can cope with (providing you can still get in – no mean feat). Some closed down with no clear path to reopening 🙁 And then the big one… no beer flights. Que? It’s not that I like a lot of beer, almost the opposite. I like to try small amounts of different types of beer. Which the North Carolina governor has deemed higher infection risk than having a pint. Maybe too many glasses to wash?
Somehow, having a pint is less social-media-grammable than a flight and in trawling through my photos, I seem to have ended up with zero pictures of our Asheville breweries. Best I can do is the exterior of New Belgium Brewing, a well known ‘craft’ brewery with some very decent beers, sold nationwide across the US. Not closed down but sadly closed to us. Literally their last day open to visit was the day before we arrived in Asheville, after which they were ‘hibernating for the winter’. Thanks COVID.
In so-called prime leaf-peeping season in the Smokies, Asheville camping was all booked up, which put us in a hotel in town for the week. Not a bad option as a change, also meant we ate out more (or got takeaway due to working late and/or restricted capacity on dine in). I guess we could have eaten in the BaseCamp in the hotel car park, but this was no Knoxville rooftop situation.
Anyway, the food turned out to be an unexpected highlight of Asheville. Indian takeaway featured poppadoms & chutneys, crunchy kale pakoras, grilled chicken tikka and spicy sag paneer. Normally deprived of anything approaching proper British curry, we were in our element.
The Lobster Pot turned out Oysters Rockefeller – baked gulf oysters with Pernod and fresh herbs, topped with hollandaise and breadcrumbs. I’m not normally an oyster fan, but this was the food of converts. Also a traditional lobster roll – a lightly toasted sub generously stuffed with meaty Maine lobster drizzled with melted butter. Accompanied by creamy lobster mac’n’cheese. Yes please.
And not forgetting a can of sparkling wine. I’m a classy chick!
But the highlight of the food week had to be our visit to Curate, a high end Spanish tapas restaurant where we lucked out in bagging a reservation. Top of the list was Oloroso sherry and acorn-fed Iberico ham. Reminded me of the last time I had Iberico de bellota (and a sherry flight if I’m not mistaken) – in Barcelona in February, before all this craziness.
This was followed by lots of tasty morsels – if I can’t do beer flights, let’s do a food flight instead 🙂 The Galician style octopus was smoky with paprika (although I have to say, it’s not Seabourn); the albondigas were packed with meaty goodness; and my new found favorite, house made spicy chorizo wrapped in potato chips (aka crisps). Delish!
Our mid-week recreation was localized around the French Broad River trail and the Botanical Gardens. It was somewhat scaled back due to a spell of autumnal weather quite closely resembling a damp, heavy, British October. As in rain. Luckily not all week.
But one of the main attractions of North Carolina, for us at least, was the Smoky Mountains. I was surprised to learn that Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited in the US, with 12.5M visitors (in 2019 – I don’t think anyone’s counting 2020 as anything close to a normal year, statistically or otherwise).
We chose a walk along the Appalachian Trail, to Charlie’s Bunion. It was heavily forested with spruce fir trees and deciduous trees in various stages of losing their leaves. Somewhat more muted than the dazzling gold of the Colorado aspens, but very pretty all the same. We’ve been a bit lazy recently so an 8.5 mile walk with 2,000ft of elevation gain nearly killed us.
OK, that’s enough of this hiking lark, let’s go play at the beach!