I usually post something about our travels.
This one is way overdue as in late September
we took a 2,400 mile road trip catching up with old friends and revisiting
favorite places, but also experiencing some very delightful times, unique to
this trip.
We started out by having a dinner in Savannah with friends
who we first met while boating in Connecticut, Suzanne and George, reminiscing about
old times and philosophical discussions about the randomness of life which
brought us to Florida and they to Savannah.
In spite of changes, health challenges we’ve managed to stay in touch
and to be emotionally close.
This was an overnight stop on the way to our initial
destination, Asheville, NC; staying first at a condo we once rented 15 or 16
years ago in the Asheville Racquet Club.
Very neat and clean, we shopped a little for breakfast stuff as we were
very familiar with the whole neighborhood.
But where there was once a cow pasture
opposite the condo there are now apartments.
In fact, the entire area south of Asheville has been built up, new
neighborhoods and condos galore.
Traffic
was a nightmare, although we were there before the peak fall season.
We called our old friends Irene and Pete who live in
Flatrock to confirm lunch sometime during the week.
We spent our first Sunday walking all over
downtown Asheville, grabbing a bite at Early Girl Cafe, having a cappuccino in
our favorite bookstore, Malaprop, and just enjoying a town we had come to love.
It’s become even more gentrified on the one hand, with pricey shops,
restaurants, and an arts district, but still a destination for a hippie
population of young people, reminding me of my days in the East Village of NY.
I’ve always made it a point when we’re in Asheville to
buy a hardcover book from Malaprop, usually a signed edition, this time Salman
Rushdie’s Quichotte. The problem with purchasing a signed hardcover
with a jacket is trying to keep it in pristine condition, so no notations and
careful handling to preserve the cover in its original condition. It’s the publisher in me that appreciates the
physical attributes of a book, but not the book reviewer. Nonetheless, I’ll have something to say about
it as I make my way through it. So many
interruptions now, as I am finally getting things back together after the
summer.
One day we took a familiar drive along the Blue Ridge
Parkway up into the Pisgah National Forest and enjoyed a delicious luncheon at
the Pisgah Inn with breathtaking views. Everyone
who has ever visited us while we rented previous years here, George and Suzanne
and our son, Jon, were all treated to the views and food here.
Vacations often allow us a special treat, like going to
the movies! So one afternoon, we found a
nearby theatre, so close in fact; we could have walked there to see the newly
released movie, Downton Abbey. We’ve been stalwart devotees of the series
and we totally loved a movie that seemed to tie up some loose ends. We were in a comfortable condo, so between
dinners at some of Asheville’s “hot” restaurants, we ran out for soups,
sandwiches and salads sometimes. We were
very “homey”.
Time, time, time, what has it done to us? We met our friends Irene and Peter for lunch
mid week and unfortunately Pete has neuropathy in both feet and can no longer
walk without a cane and aid. Irene
thankfully is in good health and had hardly changed. We picked right up where we left off. We saw them again our last night in Asheville
at a fabulous Greek Restaurant right on the grounds of our hotel, The Golden
Fleece in Grovewood Village (more on that site below).
It may seem strange that after our condo stay, we packed
up and departed for a nearby hotel which we originally booked when we conjured
up this road trip. But this isn’t just
any Hotel. It is the iconic Grove Park
Inn, where we have talked about staying during our other visits to Asheville. Although it was 9:00AM in the morning when we
checked in, luckily they had our room ready for us. There was a method to our madness as on no
other occasion would we show up so early and expect to check in. No it was because Ann had her heart set on
spending the day in their world class Spa and in order to do that, we needed to
show up, together and ready to enter the Spa at 10:00AM to purchase the very
scarce Spa Day Passes.
Lucked out again, getting our passes and changing into
our suits and with spa robes and slippers met in the pool area.
Nothing electronic is allowed, only a book or
magazine and library voices.
We swam in
the mineral pools, sat under waterfalls, went outside on a beautiful sunny day and
enjoyed an enormous heated pool with jets, lounged on the chaises, enjoyed
lobster salads al fresco in front of a roaring fireplace while Ann drank icy
Prosecco.
We swam and relaxed and were
there the entire day.
By the time we showered,
shampooed and dressed, we were totally waterlogged!
Then we rested a bit as our dinner wasn’t
until 8:15PM on the magnificent Terrace Restaurant overlooking the Blue Ridge
Mountain Range.
Ann had a fantastic
piece of Chilean Sea bass cooked to perfection.
The next morning, upon awakening in such an historic and magnificent
Hotel, where 10 Presidents going back to Calvin Coolidge have stayed, including
Obama, who visited twice in fact, plus thousands of luminaries from famous
writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, inventors like Edison, artists, actors,
industrialists, athletes
etc., we
decided to spend a good part of the day simply exploring the hotel and all the
historical artifacts, portraits and photographs, many of the actual excavation
and construction of this unusual stone edifice.
In fact, that weekend the Hotel was honoring F. Scott Fitzgerald
who occupied rooms 441 and 443 in the original Inn during two summers while his
wife Zelda was convalescing in Asheville.
Those rooms were opened to the public, with memorabilia appropriate for
those years, imagining how it might have looked, his desk, his bed, but the
view out the window and down the hall are of course the same.
Fitzgerald thought he’d pick up enough gossip
at the Inn to write a number of short stories, but he mostly lounged and
drank.
He even invited “women of the
night” to his rooms, while the Inn made an unsuccessful effort to cut off his
drinking and even philandering, all to no avail.
Fitzgerald, the charmer, was a generous
tipper so the help managed to smuggle in all the gin and other things he
wanted.
The next morning, we agreed to experience something very extravagant
and special, the Grove Park Inn famous Blue Ridge Breakfast Buffet. It is almost impossible to describe the
cavernous rooms with an enormous variety of breakfast food of every
description, including an omelet/waffle station and 15 or 20 heated casseroles
containing eggs and meats of every description including a spinach
frittata. There was an enormous array of
homemade breads and pastries, southern biscuits, pots of fresh whipped butter
and jams and jellies. Tons of gravlax and lox and smoked fish with bagels and
all the accoutrements plus of course every hot cereal imaginable as well as an
entire area devoted to cold cereals with fresh fruits and a large variety of
yogurts and sauces.
We had a table next to large beautiful windows
overlooking the exquisite grounds as well as the omnipresent majestic mountain
range. Our waiter, Stan, an actual
Ashevillian, continually refilled our coffee cups every 30 seconds. Totally
self indulgent. We waddled away. The best part, we skipped lunch.
Frequently overlooked is one of Asheville's hidden gems,
which is adjacent to the Grove Park Inn: Grovewood Village, an historic site which
once housed the weaving and woodworking operations of Biltmore Industries.
Here we spent an entire afternoon touring
working artist studios, the Biltmore Industries Homespun Museum, a very large gift
shop filled with unimaginably beautiful hand crafts from woven goods to jewelry
to large pieces of furniture, all hand rendered.
And then there was Asheville’s only antique
car museum, which had a wide range of antique cars (although, some, cars of my
youth).
We were lucky enough to have a docent lead us
around and even admit us into the cavernous building which once, long ago, housed
the looming business, not set up for visitors but I appreciated the way it once
was, the way it was left.
Their website explains the fascinating history: “Biltmore
Industries, a noteworthy enterprise in the history of American Craft and
textiles founded by Edith Vanderbilt and two inspired teachers, Eleanor Vance
and Charlotte Yale.
At the height of its
success in the late 1920s – under the direction of Fred Loring Seely – Biltmore
Industries had a total of 40 looms in steady operation producing bolts of some
of the finest hand-woven wool fabric in the country.
Orders were shipped as far as China and
Uruguay, and customers such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Helen Keller, and
several U.S. presidents and first ladies.”
At this point, I need to introduce some serendipity. Ann’s lovely friend, Joyce, has a daughter
Terri, who Ann met once briefly. She,
along with husband Bryan, built a contemporary house up a steep mountainside in
a little town just on the outskirts of Asheville. When Joyce heard we were going there for nine
days, she told Terri who immediately invited us to dinner. How awfully nice to have total strangers over
for dinner!
Terri is a professional “food stylist” – those lovely
pictures you see in gourmet magazines don’t happen by accident. She is also a French trained cook and she and
her husband have lived in Tuscany (did I mention Bryan is fluent in a number of
languages?), and her other guests, a gay couple who have a house in walking
distance on the same mountain and a condo in downtown Asheville contributed
exotic hors d'oeuvres.
It was a long, festive night, with a delicious dinner and
homemade chocolate chip cookies to end a perfect meal and when time came to leave,
the wisdom of my-forward-thinking when we first arrived paid off.
When we drove up the narrow mountain road and
squeezed into their driveway, I thought there is no way I would be able to turn
around in the dark to go back down the mountain, unless I back into the
driveway while I can still see it.
So,
as we emerged into the blackness of the night, I was feeling pretty good about the
decision until I realized that one could hardly find the car.
Their neighborhood association has a no light
policy at night so those beautiful dark skies squeeze out every drop of
starlight and/or moon light, but the moon was not up.
So we carefully made our way to our car until
I heard one of our hosts say, “if you hear a sound, it’s probably one of the
bears in the area” (seriously).
It was
as if we had rockets on our shoes from that moment to get into the car.
Mountain living would appeal to me, but this
old salt is shipwrecked at water’s edge.
We left Asheville for an overnight in Cary, NC, near one
of my best friends, Ron. He and Barbara,
like Ann and I, come from publishing roots.
Ron and I worked together since 1986 when the company he was working
for, Praeger, was acquired by mine, Greenwood Publishing Group. He and I forged a strong professional and
personal bond. When later he received an
offer to run the Naval Institute Press I advised him to take it, knowing full
well the loss to us and to me personally not seeing him day to day. Barbara had
worked for Oxford University Press and Ann before becoming a Mom in her mid
thirties, worked for a division of Academic Press, so we all have a
professional life in common as well as similar politics, interest in travel,
and let’s not forget food as Barbara made a delicious salmon dinner, our second
homemade meal. It was so welcome to
spend a night with good friends, and not at a restaurant.
Ron, like me, was a baseball player as a kid. And he’s a lefty too, so I promised to bring
my mitt which I stuck in the car before we left. I last threw a baseball with my elderly
neighbor (who in the 1950s faced Herb Score in high school, and got a hit!) but
it’s been years. So the questions were
a) could these septuagenarians still throw a ball and b) could they do so
without having their arms in slings afterwards?
I’ve always wondered watching old timer games, seeing ex MLB pitchers
having trouble even getting the ball to home plate from the mound. Well, Ron and I found we could still bring
it. We probably threw for about 20 minutes,
tosses of course, not heat (no heat left), but we felt pretty good about it and
the next day nothing hurt. Now that NY
has lost the ALCS, I’m not expecting an immediate call up, but maybe for spring
training?
The next morning we left for the Jane Austen Society of
North America’s annual conference, this one “200 Years of Northanger Abbey:
‘Real, Solemn History,’” which fittingly took place in our nation’s colonial
capital, Williamsburg, VA.
Now in the
interests of full disclosure this is one Jane Austen novel I’ve never read (Ann
has and it is her least favorite).
But
that did not ruin it for us as between the plenary and breakout sessions there
was lots of lively talk and presentations from scholars all over the world.
As Jane said “My idea of good company...is the
company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation;
that is what I call good company.”
The conference allowed us to see other old friends,
including Betty and her daughter Claudia, both Janites, who drove down from Connecticut. We shared a dinner on our one free
night. Also, the evening of the ball is
always fun, many dressed in their finest costumes of the Regency Period.
The best part was the location. We wanted to take in Colonial Williamsburg and
scheduled two whole days of sightseeing before the Conference officially began. However, the weather was uncooperative, 98
degrees with a heat index of 107. Yikes! Also, our hotel was a couple of miles away
from the conference center, and a long walk into town. There is a bus which circles the area, every
ten or fifteen minutes for which we bought a pass.
How we could have put a visit to Williamsburg on the back
burner all these years traveling between Florida and Connecticut is
unconscionable, and I tried to make up for that one morning, striking out on my
own, by foot and taking in every bit of history I could.
One of my main objectives was to visit the campus of
William and Mary the oldest university in the American South and the alma mater
of Thomas Jefferson. It is right at the
base of the Duke of Gloucester Street which is the main street. I walked much of the W&M campus, classes
were changing and I walked among the students, so different than when I went to
college holding books and notebooks under my arm. Now, there are just small knapsacks to hold
one’s notebook computer or iPad, and snacks.
I guess they looked at me as one of the old professors, or didn’t notice
me at all. That’s ok. I drank in every bit of architecture and
greenery I could, having gone to a city school which had none of those
attributes.
I thought much of my friend Ron, who I had just visited
and thrown a ball with. W&M is his
alma mater and it made me feel closer to him on the one hand and wistful on the
other as unlike his father who encouraged him to go there, I had a family who
just wanted me to go into the army and the Signal Corps to learn photography
and then join my father’s photography business.
No, this campus life was never meant to be for me.
As you probably know, this is a pedestrian only area and
people in the town are dressed as they would have been in the 18th
century, practicing their trades in real time.
We took in the printer and bindery, the courthouse, the wig maker, the
weaver, the shoemaker, among other sites.
At the peak of the hottest day we visited their beautiful Art Museum,
which is being expanded, showcasing furniture, weapons, silver, ceramics,
paintings, toys, & folk art. They
also have a nice little restaurant.
And, needless to say, we had to have a colonial meal at King’s
Arms Tavern where Ann had their house specialty, the peanut soup. This is made from peanut butter and has the
consistency of pea soup. Delicious.
On the streets we saw ministers of the time, and even
George and Martha Washington riding by.
Town’s people dressed in 18th century costumes were moving up
and down the streets. One could spend a
week here and not see everything. We
will come back, but maybe in the spring, not summer!
So, after five days and nights there we drove home, made
an overnight stop for sleep as a 14 hour straight drive with pit stops would
have been too much. Finally, home once again and as usual, trying to catch up!
COVID-19 has upended everyday life and worse, a tragedy
for those who are sick and dying, their families, as well as leaving so many
without income or resources. It is
ruthless and random. I could write pages and pages about our country’s lack of
preparation for a pandemic, or the delay in taking action because of
denial. But, this is not the entry for
that and it is well covered by our finest journalists. I’m thankful for a free press. And heartfelt
thanks to our healthcare professionals and the army of workers who have been
marginalized and now stand at the front lines, our truck drivers, grocery
workers, postal and delivery people. 
