Day 1 - Winston-Salem to Asheville, NC

After a good report from my dermatologist, we had lunch and headed to Asheville which would be the springboard of our trip.  The ride there is always long but beautiful.  We arrived around 4:30 and checked in at the Marriott Renaissance by the Thomas Wolf Memorial Homeplace.

Randy got a power nap and we walked over for dinner at the Mellow Mushroom.  I have eaten at several different Mellow Mushroom locations over the years but I think the employees at this particular Mellow Mushroom try a little too hard to be funky...

Our waiter only missed the full '60s experience by leaving out the word "groovy", he seemed to hit all the others.  After dinner, we decided to find a sporting goods store to look at binoculars to take on the trip.  On our way we took a detour through an alleyway that we had seen some time back, that was covered with the most amazing graffiti.  We wanted to see if it was still being used as a canvas.  We found the alley easily enough.  As we drove slowly through, there were a few young men loitering about but it seemed as if the graffiti craze had either been banished or the artists had lost interest and moved on.  There were only a couple of things that more resembled gang tags than art.  The rest of the walls had simply been painted over.  It was disappointing because the art we had previously seen had been pretty amazing considering it was done with spray paint.

Asheville is such a pretty little city and artists seem to be drawn there.  Since we've already visited there several times, there really wasn't any reason to stay more than overnight.  We were really wanting to begin our adventure so we finished up the evening early so we could get an early start in the morning.