Back in the Mountains

 This week Trish and I are back near Waynesville at the SWAG, the Great Country Inn of the Smokies, where I tell stories and we lead hikes each day.  This is the land of my childhood and the memories here are rich indeed.

Spring has arrived here and we seem to be alternating days of rain and sunshine.  The rhododendrons are spectacular and the grass is green.

On one of our clear days we had a beautiful hike up to Hemphill Bald where we overlook Cataloochee Ranch and Ski Area.  The Ranch has recently been purchased by the SWAG owners and is being remodeled as a family resort area.  The day was clear and the views were long.

Walking in the other direction we saw a small wren fly out from under a root beside the trail.  We discovered that she had built her nest under that root and there were four beautiful eggs in the nest.  Maybe they will hatch before we have to leave at the end of the week.

Shoals Festival

 Trish and I just finished the Shoals Storytelling Festival in Florence, Alabama.

Held in the great old Shoals art-deco era movie theatre, I was joined by Dolores Hydock, Bil Lepp, and Elizabeth Ellis, as well as several musicians.

The whole event started on Thursday evening with Dolores, accompanied by musician Bobby Horton, performing her historical story of Sallie Independence Foster based on the intact diary of that child who kept a personal daily diary from 1861 to 1887.  Sallie Foster lived in a big house that still stands at the head of Court Street (the Main Street) of Florence just above the Shoals Theatre.  This gave us a wonderful local history beginning place.

The festival concluded with local musicians on Saturday evening.

Wheels Through Time

 While we were in the mountains, Trish and I had a morning visit to the Wheels Through Time Museum located in Maggie Valley.

The museum houses part of the collection of Dale Walksler in a 38,000 square foot display building.  There are nearly four hundred working motorcycles displayed in settings proper to their era and usage.  There are examples from military to hill climbing to wood track racing to road use and more.

There are also historic vehicles besides motorcycles and worlds of paraphernalia to go with it all.  Even if you have no interest in motorcycles, the museum will still have things to be amazed by.

Boyd Mountain Cabins

 Trish and I are back at The SWAG this weekend for a retreat with the Friends of the Smokies.  Since there are more people here than can be accommodated at The SWAG, some of us are staying at Boyd Mountain Cabins just down the mountain.

Danny Boyd and I went to high school together in Waynesville and graduated in the same class.  We went off to college and Danny went on to dental school.  During his twenty-five years of practicing dentistry in Waynesville, Danny undertook the transformation of the farm on which he grew up.  Christmas trees began to be farmed and historic log cabins acquired and remodeled.  Now Danny and his wife, Betsy, run Boyd Mountain Cabins and Christmas tree farm full time.  It is a beautiful place indeed.

There are thousands of Christmas trees growing all around us.  It is interesting to see their sizes and watch the way they grow on land too steep for any other use.

If you need a quiet place to rest on the North Carolina side of the Smokies, you might like Boyd Mountain Cabins.  We sure do!

Spring???

 Spring is slow in coming to the island.  Our weather system is a battle between the Gulf Stream and the prevailing systems from the Southwest.  It is a roller coaster season.

This past weekend, Easter Weekend, the busiest pre-season weekend for tourism, saw the Hatteras Ferry shut down from Saturday until Tuesday due to weather shoaling of the channel and high winds.  People who were on Ocracoke for the week before Easter could not get off the island until Tuesday and people planning to arrive on Saturday had to turn round me go home.  Fortunately we were home until Tuesday.

Our little garden is growing, though.  The asparagus patch has given us three batches of asparagus.  The first lettuce will be ready to eat by this weekend.  The corn is about six inches high, and the onions and garlic are growing.

Our irises are also in full bloom.  Most of them came from Trish’s mother, so, they are especially valued by us.  

 

Back at The Swag

 Each year Trish and I spend two weeks as Experts In Residence at The Swag, The Great Country Inn Of The Smokies.  During those weeks we lead walks through the woods in the adjacent Great Smoky Mountains National Park and I tell stories before dinner each day.

Every morning we take a picture looking out over Haywood County, my childhood home, as every day is unique and different from every other one.

Before the season starts each year, David and Annie Colquitt, have all of the Experts in for a weekend all together.  Our job is to stay in all the guest rooms (seventeen of them this year) and be sure everything is in order for opening, give the kitchen a chance to practice before the season, be together to learn about each other, and give the owners feedback about what we have learned as Residents in past seasons.  It is a weekend of spoiling.

This year it was an extra treat to have with us Deener and Dan Matthews, the creators and original owners of The Swag.  Now retired and living in Asheville, some of the later Residents had not met them though I had the privilege of working with Dan and Deener for a dozen years before Annie and David’s ownership.

We will return for another weekend later this month for a special Friends of the Smokies weekend, then we have a full week in May and another week in October.  It is the kind of job that spoils us completely.

Dinner with the Matthews.

Coming Back to Life

 Trish and I have been pretty much self-contained for the past month.  We have experienced a series of deaths among friends, all of which were quite unexpected.  We had major roles in remembering these friends and we needed to be quiet ourselves as we processed telling them farewell for now.

This weekend we headed to the mountains and had a wonderful overnight stop in Greensboro to see Kahran, Jonathan and Cash.  We had not seen them in person for more than a month and in that time Cash has grown so much.  At age four months he has now doubled his birth weight and is sleeping straight through the night for ten or eleven hours.  Wow!

We all went out to eat and Cash took a turn with each of us.  He seems to smile and laugh all the time.  His parents say he even laughs in his sleep.  What a great visit we had, even if it was short.