Love NC #10-12

* This is the Coffee-Drinking Husband. Apparently the Sweet-Toothed Wife is too lazy to blog tonight, so she asked me to guest blog for her. This has been more specific to Asheville than to NC in general lately, but so be it! Asheville rocks.

10. The Blue Ridge Parkway

The Blue Ridge Parkway is a true feat of engineering - 469 miles of winding mountain highway designed to connect Shenandoah National Park to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It took 52 years to complete! This most-visited part of the National Parks system offers stunning vistas and is a great place to go in the Fall, where you can watch the gradient of changing Fall colors at different altitudes. Driving here is especially cool in a convertible!

11. Contra Dancing

Contra Dancing is descended from French ‘country dancing’ but with an Appalachian twist. This is the kind of dancing you might see in movies like Pride and Prejudice, but instead of classical music, you have bluegrass. Each contra dance is improvised by a ‘caller’ and is different from the previous one. Picture it as a casual but fun, and often more complicated, version of line dancing or square dancing. Pretty much every guy dances with every girl and vice versa… so this can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the crowd.

12. People Watching at the Drum Circle

Asheville is a quirky, artsy and eclectic city. During the warm months, there is a large public drum circle downtown in Pritchard Park every Friday evening. All sorts of diverse individuals dance, drum, or play some other sort of musical instrument at this regular and crowded communal gathering. You will see some pretty interesting individuals here… this is a true Asheville institution.