Ashvegas: Home of the surgically unenhanced drawn to multigrain breads

From a Florida Sun Sentinel columnist:

After a delicious lunch of pulled pork and bluegrass at the Old Hampton Store, we drove the Blue Ridge Parkway until we found it closed. We backtracked, turned around, and headed south toward Waynesville.

We had friends in Waynesville, too. Live in Florida long enough and you get friends in North Carolina. But they knew their way around, taking us to the Sunburst Trout Farm (trout fillets, smoked trout, trout sausage, trout jerky), a farm market (with an adorable 4-month-old coon dog named Andy playing in the field) and a Scottish highland cattle ranch owned by a former Disney exec (Florida again) who kept his herd bull, Maximilian, in his front yard.

One night, Florida neighbors of our Florida friends stopped by and taught us the Southern way of saying something negative about someone: You begin with: "Bless her heart ..."

In Asheville, I was disappointed to find that the establishment that advertised "eyeglasses for irreverent and jaded people" was mainly a clothing store. But otherwise the city seemed to live up to its most livable reputation with a minor league baseball team (the Tourists, who, fittingly, were out of town), a historic hotel (The Grove Park Inn), two excellent bookstores (Malaprop's and The Captain's Bookshelf), a fine — this one's for you, Max — vegetarian restaurant (The Laughing Seed), and a surgically unenhanced citizenry drawn to multigrain breads and natural fibers.

Pushing farther south, we spent our last two nights in Hendersonville. The owner of the William Gordon gallery on North Main showed us some drawings by the artist William Graham, who was having an exhibition soon. "We're going to put out signs," he said, "saying ' Billy Graham's nudes.'"

Comments

[jaybird]

Lawd, Floridiots just keep coming. When can we start a border patrol?