7 May 2016, Saturday

We awake about 7 am. Some surrounding campers are already up and have
smokey fires burning. We quickly take down our mostly dry tent and
head for Asheville, stopping at a scenic overlook on the road out of
Cataloochee to admire the view and photograph the resident Towhee.

We reach Sunny Point Cafe for breakfast without difficulty, but we have to park way
down the residential street as the parking lot is full. Mom would be
happy with our choice of restaurant- lots of cars in the parking lot!. The cafe is very accommodating, providing all the coffee you might like to drink on the outdoor patio while we wait for our table. Breakfast is delicious and probably has enough calories for the entire next week. O has the breakfast burrito and potatoes, and I have a mushroom-arugula-brie omelette with spicy cheese grits and a huge fluffy biscuit. I eat all of it!

Next stop – Asheville’s REI. I feel like we are not only touring the
nation’s parks, but also its REI stores. O points out we also seem to
be touring the Trader Joe’s of the USA. Our next task is replenishing
our supply of chardonnay in a box. We try two different locations
noted in our GPS as wine stores, neither one seems to exist.

We give up and enter our hotel in the GPS. We are led up a dirt forest
road through the Pisgah National Forest. After 4 miles we find the
road blocked by construction vehicles. O turns the car around for me
on the narrow road and avoids going over the edge. Then I drive the 4
miles back to paved road and civilization. I re-enter our destination
and Jack (our GPS) now takes us via the interstate. We arrive in no
time. I’m not sure what the forest road was all about. An instant of
GPS dementia?

The motel does not yet have our room ready so we are off to Trader Joe’s
again to stock up on wine, yogurt, grapes and cookies. By the time we
return to the motel our room is ready. I start the laundry and work
on journalling while O showers. Then he can take over laundry duty
while I shower. We hope to have time for dinner at Wicked Brew before
our John McCutcheon concert at 8.

True to form, the concert is great!  John sings some of our old favorites,
plays some beautiful hammer dulcimer music, sings some new songs and
tells a great story of when he was about 11 years old and had
just become the starting catcher for his little league team (the
pinnacle of success at that time in his life.) He was searching for
his mom to give him a ride to the game, worried he would be late.
Much to his surprise, he found her watching TV in the middle of the
afternoon. . . surprising, as she is a woman who did her best to never allow her children to watch TV in the daytime.  Not only that. . .she invited him to sit down and watch
with her. She was watching the 1963 march on Washington. John
mentioned it was the first event ever to be broadcast on all three
channels (yes, 3 channels) at once.  He had never seen folk singers
before, and he had never heard such preaching. He described some of
those singers, particularly a threesome, two very sinister looking
guys with goatees, and a girl with long blond hair who looked so
Nordic, “she could have been from Wisconsin.” They sang two songs, one
about “hardware” like hammers and bells, and one that asked a lot
of questions and had a refrain, something about “the ants are my
friends. .  ?!” He had to learn more about this folk music. (S,
this kind of reminds me of “oh we like sheep.)

Anyway, great concert!! We are back at our room. The tent, which we had
spread out on the floor, is now quite dry and folded away. Time for
bed!