Asheville

I am sitting by the fire in Asheville, North Carolina. The Great Smoky Mountains stand blue and funnily enough, smokey, in the distance. Spring has only just begun here as it is much cooler than other parts of the Carolinas.

I arrived around lunchtime and then thought to take a drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway. www.blueridgeparkway.org/ (I put this here to remind myself in the future I would like to cycle some of this area.) This is a famous American roadway constructed during the Great Depression to create jobs and stretches from just south of here up to Shenendoah National Park. Unfortunately for me the southbound route is closed due to rock slides so I tried to take a detour and got myself hopelessly lost. But Fortuna was smiling because I found myself in a mountain village called Luck, and then another, Hope and finally, Trust. Yes I am for real! So with a little bit of luck, hope and trust I made my way to the Pisgah National Forest where I spent an enjoyable afternoon viewing waterfalls along a mountain stream and then at 4.30 decided I needed some exercise after a day in the car so started on the Looking Glass Trail, a 6.4mile trail to the peak of an exposed granite rockface, reminiscent of Girraween NP. Unfortunately for me 3.2miles of the trail are straight up and up and up. It's funny how miles suddenly start to seem much, much longer than kilometres on a vertical slope! So my bit of exercise became a race against the sun. I'm proud to say that a suggested 31/2hour hike (I checked this afterwards) took me only 2hours and I suspect some sore leg muscles tomorrow!