This, my friends, is why they call them the Smoky Mountains.
Pics from our weekend in Asheville. I didn't take a ton because we always stay at the same cabin, and it's usually the same view and the trip is typically the same trip. I think that's why it's so relaxing. Or maybe it's just that stunning view is enough to shut anyone's mind off for a little while.
Here's last year's trip. And the first year.
This year was really no different, except the menu changed and Abby's pregnant and we took Jonah. Which is kind of a funny way of seeing the passage of time. We take the same trip every year, but we're always slightly different people in different places in life. But we go up to the cabin in Black Mountain and we do the festival on Saturday and go out to dinner in Asheville after and we sit in the cabin and cook and decompress all day Sunday. That part doesn't change.
Jonah was a trooper though. He was reasonably patient while sticking it out for about 4 hours at a beer festival. He had a backpack of entertainment (books and monster trucks) and a baseball field full of drunks to laugh at his jokes. Plus, there's live bluegrass to dance to and festival food to feast on, so really not that bad of a deal for a kid, I suppose. Saturday, he had movies to entertain him when he got tired of all his books and monster trucks and battling between the good undead and the evil undead.
It was pretty epic, I must say. It's still going on, apparently. One of the good undead is Max's friend Jacob who was killed in the war, but Max brought the good undead back from the dead to help fight the evil undead and so Jacob came back and he fights with them. Jacob has a sword in his chest that he pulls out to fight when necessary. I could think of more convenient locations to store one's weapon when not in use. But if I were undead, I don't know, I guess I wouldn't give a fuck either. The chest is just as good a storage place as a scabbard, I suppose, in the absence of a functioning nervous system.
Abby was a trooper too, man. I went to the Music City Brewer's Festival during my pregnancy. The weather situation might have been more awful (late July on concrete in downtown Nashville) but it was a shorter session and most of all, the beers at that one just outright suck by comparison to Brewgrass. I mean, the craft beer scene is overall improved in Nashville in the past six years, but Western North Carolina's beer scene is pretty freakin' fantastic. There's a lot of experimental stuff that gets brought out. A brewery will have a single keg of something. Twice Chris waited in line for one of the special releases and they ran out before he got a pour. But anyway, as I was saying, I felt very empathetic to Abby, but assured her that her sacrifice is worth it and in the grand scheme is a small thing, as far as investment of time goes.
Monday night we got back home, unloaded, went to get some food and went to see Ben Folds Five at The Ryman. Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips and Ke$ha got up to do a Conway Twitty/Loretta Lynn duet ("You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly") at one point. I was kind of blown away and my entire opinion of Ke$ha is turned on its head. Her voice was spot on vintage Country Western. It was pretty uncanny.
That was something that was different, too. Having to lie to my kids school to keep him out Monday for us to travel home and then taking him out to a concert that night that didn't start until after his bedtime. We're such irresponsible parents.
But I don't feel guilty in the slightest. We talked to him about the importance of not letting this special occasion affect his school. That he couldn't fight us on getting up and getting ready in the morning. That he had to stay above the line (behavior system they use) all day and work extra hard to catch up with what he missed. That if he couldn't do that, we couldn't ever do anything like this again. He did a fantastic job in school yesterday and he worked his little brain out when he got home to catch up on his homework homefun. That's what they call it. So, I'm really proud of him for putting in the extra effort to stay on track.
But anyway, it was absolutely perfectly timed. I was a shaky mess on Friday. I'm surprised I didn't forget anything while packing. But as soon as we got closer to the mountains, everything started to slip away. I'm so very grateful for this trip every year. This time of year is always so hectic, it's nice to have some space to breathe away from everything. Good company helps, too.