September 1998--North Carolina

I had a September similar to the one George describes in his e-mail about the Smokies. In 1998, we decided to see the autumn leaves in the mountains of western North Carolina, and after visiting family in Raleigh, drove to Asheville, home of author Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel, etc.). Only my second time there, and the first time, in the 1960s, I had missed touring his childhood home because it was closed for renovation. I didn't get to see the home the second time either, because someone had intentionally burned it down!

The rest of the trip went much better, fortunately. We went to dinner at the Grove Park Inn and became aware for the first time then that it was a premiere example of Arts & Crafts-era architectural design. Turns out they hold one of the main Arts & Crafts conventions there every year. The car rental agency had given us a convertible for no extra charge, and after we left Asheville, we drove with the top down along two-lane mountain roads just looking up at the trees. Highlands was a beautiful little town, and we met some great people at a B&B there. We timed the season just right, and most of the leaves had just turned.

We went through Carl Sandburg's home near Flat Rock, which we also came across by accident. It was on a hill next to a pond on a very picturesque piece of property. As it turned out, Sandburg had moved there in part so his wife could raise her prise-winning goats on the land. Having really only known about his urban poetry from his Chicago days, I hadn't realized he spent much of the last half of his life in rural North Carolina.

After North Carolina, we drove through part of eastern Tennessee and saw several civil war battlefields, Andrew Jackson's Hermitage, the University of the South and Nashville. If you ever get a chance to see Chickamauga, just south of Chattanooga in northern Georgia, do it--it is pristine, and gives you a real sense of how the landscape looked and felt during the period. Ambrose Bierce wrote a superb piece about the battle, and there's a monument to his unit (under General Hazen, I believe) at the site. The Confederates won this battle, and I think the Union lost a lot of men there.

Nashville, of course, has RCA Studio B, where Elvis, Roy Orbison and Chet Atkins, among others recorded. We had fun at Sammy B's nearby, a lunch place frequented by music industry people.

It doesn't occur enough to people not from that part of the country to visit, and September is definitely the best time to do it. We wished we had spent more time in the mountains of North Carolina than we did--it's a scenic, unspoiled area. I've never seen so many waterfalls. Highlands would be a good central place there to stay, and then you could take day trips to other parts of the mountains.