Asheville Autumn 2007

The little city of Asheville is always a wonder. It's a lusty town, a teen-age place, but it's also filled with old, old folks. It's a place of beauty with with a brand new band-aid and a worn-out temporary patch. The new green place now being finished in front of its City Hall and County Courthouse soon will be filled with performers of music and art, and the place will ring and resonate throughout the spring, sumer and autumn of every year. it will be a show without an end.


Thomas Wolfe lived here, and he wrote here too. Later he said something about not ever going home again – in part because the Asheville folks were mad at him for what he wrote about them and wouldn't LET him come back. But what would he know? He wrote with the top of his refrigerator as his desk. He was a big guy. O. Henry was another Ashevillian, along with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Carl Sandburg down at Flat Rock, Wilma Dykeman called Asheville her home, and its nearby Black Mountain College hosted the likes of Josef Albers, Thornton Wilder, John Dewey, Albert Einstein, and Henry Miller. Buckminster Fuller designed and built his first geodesic dome here. Robert Rauschenberg studied art here, and John Cage and Merce Cunningham puttered around with music and dance at the tiny school which closed forever in 1957 after graduating a total of 60 students.

The Vanderbilts came to Asheville too, one of them built a 250+ room house on his 1100 acre plot. It is still called "Americas's Biggest House". Billy Graham lives over between Black Mountain and Asheville, and Bob Moog, the creator of the famous sentheiser, died here in 2007.



There's a lot more, too. Like the time the New York Yankees were playing the Brooklyn Dodger team in famous McCormick Field, their left fielder, a guy named Babe Ruth ate so many of Asheville's hot dogs and drank so much of its beer that he came down with the infamous "bellyache heard round the world". That's the way the story goes, but actually the Babe was sick when he got here, collapsed at the depot and went to the hospital instead of the field, but the year before, while playing here in Asheville, he did claim that this was a delightful place to play, "damned delightful" he was quoted as saying.

Today, you can walk down O. Henry Avenue and see the Citizen-Times newspaper office.


Half a block more will take you past the federal building with its wild sculpture. Inside is the offices of the American Naional Climatic Data Center.


















Back to the Little City again, this time for a two-night visit. The weather had been perfect with light balmy breezes, lots of warm sunlight and bright blue skies. But today, Asheville revealed it claws with a blighting wind of 55 to 60 mph which flung cold leaves and snow flakes at us as its temperatures fell to 27°! Brrrrr.

At the hotel we couldn’t even keep the trunk lid up to get our bags out, and then the bags wanted to scoot along on the frozen pavement.

We ate in Vincenzo’s which was pricy, and the food was OK. I had potato dumplings with Bolognese sauce, which was like a very good pork barbeque, but that was all there was, and it was too much of that. I would have been happy with perhaps one-fourth the amount of meat sauce and some creative vegetables provided as a side dish. There were no surprises, no sense of an elegante moment; it was tasty food, but I expected more than that for the price and the location. I was disapointed.

Next morning was frigid, but with brilliant blue skies and a wind that slowly moderated throughout the morning into a pleasant afternoon. After the seminar, we shopped for cars.

For lunch we hit the Thai restaurant known as Tamarind. Excellent! Surprises galore here. Good food, well prepared and served. Great ambience. Tasteful decorations and tasty food. A sense of being "somewhere else". The waitress was very friendly and helpful. A good place to go to for lunch, probably great for dinner too.

That night we went for dinner to the restaurant known as "The Table". Wow! Wow! Wow! I don’t know what else to say. It was one of my most incredible dining experiences. This is why people who love to travel become adicted to it, because of peak experiences like eating at The Table in Asheville. I had the Hanger Steak, but I don’t think it would really make any difference. Amazing. Didn’t I make any pictures of "The Table"? I did, but I ate THEM the next day. Later, I went back (just to make a photo)!