After our adventures in Congaree, we packed up the tent in the rain and headed north towards Asheville. We spent the afternoon kicking around funky old downtown Asheville, which was great. Not too many pictures taken, but we did get this photo of Anna with a cool sculpture of a fiddle on a bench near the Performing Arts Center. We stopped off at the co-op for some provisions and then headed out of town in search of camping for the night. We got caught in a crazy hailstorm while navigating downtown, traffic just stopped mostly, hail came down in sheets, and in an instant the water was flowing 3 or 4 inches deep everywhere you could see. Then just as quick as it started it was over and we had a pretty dry evening at a little campground outside of town.
Next morning we made the (relatively) short drive up into the Park. We took the slow route though, up through the Cherokee reservation and the town of Cherokee. Anna was pretty fiesty by the time we hit the park, so we stopped right away to stretch and get our backcountry permit. It turned out that they were having a special event that day depicting turn of the century “women’s work” on a typical farm, so we stopped to check it out.
They have a “working” farm on the property to some degree, made up of buildings that were salvaged, transported and restored when the park was established. They’ve got all the old buildings a farm might have had from the small cabin, chicken coop, apple house, smokehouse/meat storage, spring house, barn, corn crib…more I’m forgetting. Some beautiful gardens. We got a nice photo of Nicki and Anna standing in the little orchard with the chicken coop in the background.
We saw demonstrations of spinning wool into yarn, making soap, washing laundry, food preservation and canning (Where we learned from a very nice old lady, among other things, that “you can not cook any kind of bean without a piece of pork in there”.), front porch fiddle/guitar/autoharp/banjo singing, biscuit making, and toy making (the crankiest lady worked this station, paradoxically. We weren’t allowed to play with the toys).
We spent a good part of the afternoon there, had a nice picnic lunch, saw the old mill, which had been restored and was grinding cornmeal and different flours. It was unique in that it used a turbine rather than some sort of waterwheel system, and it was pretty cool to see in action.
We spent the evening back in Asheville and met up with our old friend Bae who used to live with us way back when Nicki and I first met. Bae and her husband Silas work at a camp outside of Sapphire, NC up in the mountains but they had come into Asheville for the weekend so we spent the evening with them. Made a great dinner, and sat up reminiscing and catching up. We were supposed to head out early morning to get back up into the park and on the trail, but Silas also whipped up an incredible breakfast so we had to stick around, eat, drink some coffee etc. It was such a brief visit really, but it was one of the highlights of the trip. (No picture of Bae and Silas? What were we thinking?).
We had chosen a hike in the northeastern portion of the park in the Cataloochee Valley, which we subsequently learned quite a bit about. It turned out to be the perfect little 2-day 9.5 mile loop. We headed out Sunday, Father’s Day, so we only saw a couple people on the trail. Our campsite was ~4.5 miles in, and the hike took us past an old farmstead, before climbing a pretty steep drainage for a couple of miles. 
Anna did pretty well in the pack, except when we had to climb which apparently was too slow a pace for her. We fended her requests to get down out of the pack with singing (difficult when climbing a steep hill with a heavy pack) and snacks. We hit our campsite pretty early in the afternoon, as we didn’t really have too far to travel. But truth be told we were tired. We got the tent set up and played some games and splashed in the creek for a while, but we ate dinner pretty early and turned in long before dark.
Hiked out the next morning and spent some time exploring some other parts of the valley. There was another old homestead, a schoolhouse, and a chapel (in the photo, obscured, but I liked the view of the hillside). Speaking of chapels, Nicki and I celebrated our 10th year anniversary together that day. We had kind of a weird day really, because we had to do a bunch of running around, had to get the rental car returned, had to get a hotel, pack up, clean up, etc. We had ourselves a hotel room near the Asheville Regional Airport, and since we had no transportation we had a nice dinner at the chain restaurant across the parking lot. Still we sighed, clinked our glasses, and toasted 10 years as Anna colored on the table and shredded the napkins. It was a day to be remembered.
