Meltdown in Asheville

Featured image above – downtown Asheville, NC. Photo credit: exploreasheville.com

Earlier this summer, we did a road trip through North Carolina.  Mary grew up there, and we always enjoy driving back through the mountains. We had a couple restaurants we wanted to try in Asheville and Kinston, and in future posts we will tell you about those places and the meals we enjoyed. 

For today’s post, I’m publishing a selection from Mary’s travel journal that provides a bit of insight into one of our not-so-great days.  We’ve been married for 43 years, and have survived by living according to a simple rule: Only one of us can be crazy at a time. 

That rule has served us well, but the narrative below shows what happens when we forget it.  I have edited it lightly, and have inserted a couple links, but otherwise have done nothing to make us look better.   

One contextual note:  At this time, Mary was in the first weeks of a keto diet, and was still adapting to life without bread, pasta and other carbs.  She was fasting until noon some days. I’ve since started keto, and can confirm that it makes you edgy, at best.   

Mary’s Travel Journal, May 5, 2019

What an incredible and crazy day. We left our Asheville Airbnb about 9:45 this morning. We wanted to go around to three different neighborhoods to see if they would be possibilities for retirement. Mike and I really like Asheville. Throughout our drive I came to the following conclusions about Asheville:

1) Businesses are seamlessly integrated into neighborhoods. We saw a sprinkling of local restaurants, a small grocery store and even a holistic medical practitioner in residential areas.

2) The beauty of the mountains is better than I remember. (Maybe that has something to do with living in the Midwest for so long.) This morning it was still raining and the fog splotched in the trees and mountains was magnificent. The azaleas and rhododendrons are also magnificent. The colors are vivid and the plants themselves are huge.

3) Asheville feels like a big city with all that they offer, including people coming and going. And yet it still feels like a small town. Everything is open on a Sunday which feels really wonderful.

4) The arts are a big part of the city. They have a River Arts District that has taken over abandoned warehouses where artists work and sell their products.

5) I think you could eat here for years and never eat in the same place twice. There are so many local restaurants. Yeah, there is the usual fast food junk, but you hardly notice it.

6) Drivers are polite to one another and ALWAYS stop for pedestrians in crosswalks.

After driving around all morning I was beginning to need food. I once again made it until almost 12:00 without eating anything. Using Yelp!, we picked a place on Patton Street called Salsas. We head back into town and Mike is getting crabby. He is hungry and needs to pee. There are absolutely no free parking places – it is brunch time in the city and everyone is out.

We drive around for about 30 minutes and decide to pay to park. We head into Salsas and find a small table with a really nice waiter. Then the trouble starts: I get a phone call from our Airbnb hosts telling us they went downstairs to clean and we had not checked out. I had not made the reservation for two nights and they wanted us out immediately or we could rebook another night. We had already paid $177.00 for a basement apartment, but we really didn’t have much choice.

So between ordering and trying to contact our hosts and rearranging the reservation and Mike being mad and me getting madder and madder at him, lunch was a disaster.  I ended up ordering a full plate of shredded pork with rice, beans, salsa cheese, vegetables and some type of bread. Mike ordered guacamole and chips. I ate the meat and guacamole and he ate the rest. 

After lunch, I lost my mind and started screaming at him on the street after we left the restaurant. It was bad. We walked around to look at shops and to cool off while the rain sprinkled on us.

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I hope you can laugh at that.  We can. Now.

Luckily, we were able to book a second night in the AirBnb, so our stuff wasn’t set out on the street.  After cooling off in the rain, we took some time out for an afternoon nap and came back refreshed and ready for a good dinner.  More on that in the next post.

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Have you ever gone crazy while traveling?  We double-dog dare you to share your experience in the comments below. 

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