Day 21 - Asheville's Gardens and the Blue Ridge Parkway

Friday, May 27, 2022

Weather - Partly cloudy and 74 degrees, but it got cold on the Blue Ridge Parkway (all the way down to 58 degrees!) and it rained a bit on our drive home

Steps - Shaun: 10,018, Shannon: 7,586 (but her watch died part way through the day)

Varmints - Another semi-gargantuan gaggle of goats but in a different place, several more bunnies and turkeys, a deer, and three lizards. One of them was an Eastern Fence Lizard and the other two were skinks; one was a 5-lined skink and the other we can't really tell (but Shaun thinks it's a Little Brown Skink).

This was a four-part day. We started out by driving into Asheville to a restaurant that had been recommended by several sources called The Early Girl Eatery. They had vegan stuff for Shaun and the obligatory homemade biscuits for the both of us, and they even had a few locations to choose from, so we pointed the Jeep down the mountain, and away we went!

As a little bit of an aside, we must report that due to the last 36 hours of rain, the road out of the cabin was very muddy, and it actually had a river running along one half of it. This is a little concerning because it's a very rough road to begin with, so we're going to be really careful these last few times we have to drive on it. Also, once we got into Marshall and saw the big river (called the French Broad River), we realized just how much rain the area had gotten because that bad boy was REALLY high.

Anyway, back to breakfast...while we waited for a table, we checked out a cool store called Mount Inspiration that was a combination hiking store and t-shirt shop. Both of us bought a few things, and then off we went to grab our table. Both of us got really good orange juice, Shannon had multi-grain pancakes and sausage, and Shaun had a tofu scramble with spinach, onions, and peppers. It also came with tomatoes that Shaun had asked them to leave off, but they didn't. When the waitress asked how everything was, Shaun pointed out that the tomatoes didn't get omitted but said it was no big deal because she just scraped them off. The next thing we knew, the manager came to our table and told us that they'd discounted the meal because of the mistake. It turns out that they took off 50%, which we thought was more than generous. We also got molasses-glazed cornbread to have for breakfast tomorrow, so all in all, it was a good meal.

After breakfast, we checked out a few more shops on the same street as The Early Girl Eatery, and they gave us some good ideas for Sanctuary, but we didn't buy anything. Our next stop was just a few minutes away at the Botanical Garden of Asheville, which was a small non-profit garden dedicated to preserving the local plant life for future generations. Unfortunately, we happened to visit in between major blooming cycles, so there wasn't a whole lot to see. The garden had been left very natural, so it was a bit wild, but we did our best to find fun stuff to comment on and take pictures of. The little river flowing through the property was pretty cool, and it was also rushing along at a good clip due to the rain. The good thing is that it was free, and the walk was welcome after our meal, so we had no complaints whatsoever.

Directly from one garden to the next, we went to the North Carolina Arboretum, which happened to be located on Frederick Law Olmsted Way (remember him from the Biltmore Gardens?). It turns out that Freddy Baby's 200th birthday would have been this month, so they were having a celebration to thank him for his contribution to landscape design and for the numerous public green spaces he created around the world. We talked about the one in Central Park and at the Biltmore previously, but he also did the Allee at Smith College where Shannon went to school, as well as the Emerald Necklace in Boston, which is a 7-mile long series of green spaces that begin at the Arnold Arboretum (one of our favorite gardens) and ends at Boston Common. Along with his impact in Massachusetts, Olmsted also did the grounds of the US Capitol and White House, Washington Park in Chicago, and a bunch of other gardens across the country. He was truly the father of landscape architecture, but he didn't see himself as a gardener. He saw himself as an artist, and we totally agree with that assessment!

The North Carolina Arboretum was a much bigger operation than the botanical gardens, and they were even having an outdoor plant and gift sale. Unfortunately, we decided to wait until the end to check that sale out, and it was closed by the time we thought about it again. The arboretum has only been around since 1986, but in that 30+ years, they've really created a beautiful space. It had everything from a bonsai exhibit to a quilt made out of plants, and what really impressed us was the number of and the quality of the signage in the garden. Their goal is to help educate the average gardener, so one area had about 15-20 trees in pots that will grow in most home gardens, along with how and where to plant them. It was really interesting.

There was also an 8-foot-tall statue of Frederick Law Olmsted in an area with a fountain backed by the Blue Ridge Mountains.  It was very impactful. We were lucky because, unlike at the botanical gardens, these gardens were fully curated and the plants had a lot more sun to work with. This resulted in lots more plants being in bloom, so it was a much more exciting visit. The whole garden is over 400 acres, but we concentrated on the central section, and once we were finished with that, we stopped and had lunch at a little café within the arboretum itself. After we finished lunch, we hit the gift shop and headed out to our next destination, which was the Blue Ridge Parkway.

We had only been on the Parkway one other time on this trip, and we really wanted to do it justice, so we decided to go backwards on it towards where we'd traveled on it a couple weeks ago.  As you can see from the map, we covered about 50 more miles and saw a bunch of really beautiful vistas.

Once we had our fill of the Parkway, we decided to head back to the cabin, have dinner, and get ready for tomorrow. We also got to drinking our homemade strawberry lemon/limeade which we'd made last night. It was delicious, if a bit chunky. Neither one of us complained about the chunks, and between that and the strawberry shortcake made from the cat's head biscuits that we had last night, we used all our strawberries from Bryson City. We actually ate a total of 3 quarts of strawberries, so we are completely blissed out with berries this trip. We also bought 7 fresh peaches, so that'll be our fruit of choice for the last couple days. Nummo!

Tomorrow, we've decided to go to Grandfather Mountain, which has a mile-high swinging bridge we can actually walk across, and visit Black Mountain, an artsy-type community east of Asheville, so stay tuned!