Sorry for the lack of a post yesterday, but, as hard as it is to believe, I stayed out until 12:30 am. Oddly, I didn’t feel like blogging when I got back to the hotel.

We left Charleston yesterday morning and had an uneventful four-hour drive back to Asheville. We had all wanted to see the Biltmore estate, which is the largest private home in the United States, built by the Vanderbilts back in 1890. Meredith and I had been in the summer several years ago, but a friend had told us the house was an amazing thing to see at Christmas. Plus, Dubbs had never seen it before, and we NEVER get to introduce the well-traveled Dubbs to anything new.

We hadn’t seen the Biltmore on the first leg of the vacation because while I was e-mailing back and forth with the guest services about what kind of ticket we needed, they sold out for our days. At that point, Dubbs leapt into action, finding there were a few tickets left for a 10:45 pm admission to the house, but only on Wednesday the 29th. So we extended the vacation by one day to fit the tour in, with the added bonus of turning a twelve-hour driving day (from Charleston) into a nine-and-a-half-hour day (from Asheville, which took us a little farther west than we needed to go).

We arrived to see the estate grounds during the day, getting to the house, after driving the two-and-a-half-mile driveway, around 1:00. The driveway was deliberately designed to be long and winding, in order to have guests to the house enjoy the surrounding nature. It used to take forty-five minutes to get to the house. Our hotel is a seven-minute drive from the entrance, but it took us twenty-five minutes to get home from the house. It’s a large estate.

In a fit of madness, Dubbs asked me what we should see, and I told her the pond was pretty. So we took off for the pond and boathouse, heading downhill for the water I had seen from the house. Although Mer and I had been here a few years back, the path did not look familiar to me, but I chalked that up to the assumption that we had taken a different way. Or not. When we got to the “pond,” it turned out to be the “lagoon.” And not so pretty as the pond. Ooops. So much for asking me what we should see. Still, it got me and Meredith to a place we hadn’t seen.

After hiking the long and uphill hike back to the house, we toured two of the gardens. They are a little underwhelming in late December, but a few things were still in bloom. We chatted with a gardener who said that the Biltmore could employ as many as forty-five gardeners, but they never had that many since the Asheville area cost of living was so high; people couldn’t afford to live locally and work as a gardener.

We did get to see a lot of blooming plants in the greenhouses, and some were very pretty. Meredith likes plants with leaves that have two or more colors, and there were several varieties of that, along with cacti, ferns, flowering trees, and more. The greenhouses are huge, and so we spent a fair amount of time there.

We took a quick detour to the gift shop; Dubbs had promised to pick something up for a mutual friend. By now, it was about 4:00, so we went to check into the hotel via the circuitous route of getting off the estate. Since we knew we had a late night coming up, Dubbs and I took naps while Meredith graded.

We got back to the house about 10:15, and got into the house right on time at 10:45. We grabbed an audio tour recording, and spent a happy touring time in the house, going through about thirty of the 260 rooms of the house. We got to see the main dining room, with the seven-story roof above, where multi-course meals were served to guests, with the entire dining experience lasting two hours, while the guests were dressed in evening attire (not sweats, as we might prefer by today’s standards!).

We saw the more intimate breakfast/lunch room, the main atrium, which houses an indoor garden, the grand staircase, Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s bedrooms, some of the thirty guest bedrooms, the billiard room, the smoking room, the guest lounge area, the bowling alley in the basement, the indoor swimming pool (now dry since it leaks), the kitchen areas, and some of the plain (but comfortable-looking) servants’ quarters. All of the main upstairs rooms were decorated with Christmas trees, including a huge one in the dining room. All the fireplaces had (gas) fires burning, and despite the expanse of the house, most of the rooms felt intimate. It is a grand place indeed.

That ended the official touring of the trip, and we walked back to the car in the first real rain we’ve had on the trip. That was an excellent way to be reminded of how blessed we were to have sunny days and, with the exception of the first day, warm temperatures. Both Asheville and Charleston acquitted themselves very well. But I am ready to get back to my own castle now, and see my kitties, friends, and relations.

After breakfast in a cute nearby cafe, we headed downtown to the wharf, to catch a sightseeing boat for a ninety-minute tour of the Charleston harbor. It was a bit foggy, but we could still see Fort Sumter from the dock, and we could see the huge bridge across the river, so I figured it would be okay. The fog lifted during the tour, but it stayed overcast, which was fine with us since we were sitting on the top deck. Too much sun could have been hot, and certainly could have burned one or more of us pasty people.

The tour was mellow, but informative and often funny. The captain of the boat narrated as we went around the harbor, and we learned a bunch of things:

• The cruise ship dock is either going to get a facelift or a new one will be built soon. The current one is quite ugly.
• No building in downtown can be higher than the highest church steeple (about 240 feet).
• The first shot of the Civil War was fired from Fort Johnson (which is near Fort Sumter), which fired a warning shot that signaled other Confederate cannons to fire on Fort Sumter.
• Fort Sumter surrendered when its men ran out of supplies and after they had been hit by an estimated 45,000 cannonballs. No one was killed in the battle, although one Union army solder died after a gunpowder accident during the military honors that the Confederate army gave to the surrendering soldiers.
• For Sumter used to be quite a bit taller, but was knocked down by all the cannon fire.
• During the Revolutionary War, the British fired on a wooden fort in Charleston harbor, but the cannonballs just bounced off the local palmetto wood. The Americans went out and collected the balls and shot them back.
• The far side of the harbor is one of the most expensive places to buy a home in the US.
• Charleston shrimp are never frozen – they are sent directly to local markets.
• The huge bridge was built after one of the two old bridges received a safety rating of four (out of one hundred).
• The new bridge came in under budget and ahead of schedule.
• And we saw two dolphins playing in the wake of the prow of the boat. That was fun.

After the tour, we headed across said huge bridge to Mt. Pleasant, where we grabbed a quick lunch, and then drove to Patriots Point, the home of the retired aircraft carrier the USS Yorktown. It is also home to a destroyer and other military exhibits, but we only had time for the Yorktown.

What a ship. It is ginormous, and the Yorktown is small by today’s standards. We spent almost five hours on board her, and we still didn’t see everything (although we came very close). We talked to some Navy vets at the information center so we could ask them general questions about carriers, and then we set off touring the hanger deck, where aircraft used to be stored. It is now home to many displays, and the World War 2 aircraft that would have been on board. The top deck is home to the jets and other planes that were used on the Yorktown until she was retired in 1970.

We saw a good film that interviewed several (now older) members of the crew, which was informative and touching, especially when they were talking about the friends they lost. The movie also spliced in original footage from World War 2.

We took self-guided tours of the guts of the boat. The ship was home to three thousand men, and so became a small city. It had three dentists on board, a police staff, a brig, a snack shop, regular doctor office hours (twice a day), a laundry, a machine shop, electronics repair, a kitchen capable of serving three thousand men four meals a day (counting “midrat” – a meal a midnight for men on duty). The kitchen had ingredients set out to make ten thousand chocolate chip cookies.

I loved going all the way down to one of the engine rooms. It is full of huge machines and is very cramped, and when running, it could get up to 130 degrees. The ship ran off of steam generated by oil-fired boilers. There were four engine rooms each driving a fifteen-ton propeller. I think the fastest speed I saw listed was thirty knots (thirty-four mph) if all four were running full-out.

On the other end, we got up to the flight deck, and then were able to climb up into the bridge. The views of the area were grand, and the sun had come fully out.

The Yorktown was involved in the first carrier versus carrier battle in which the fight was all carried out by planes – the ships never saw each other. She was also involved in the battle for Midway (after having been patched together in seventy-two hours for repairs that should have taken weeks).  The Yorktown survived the war and was in service long enough to be the recovery ship for Apollo 8, which was the first Apollo mission to orbit the moon.

It was a fascinating afternoon. Dubbs waited patiently while Meredith and I finished up by getting into a flight simulator (which was fun, but really just an amusement ride), and then lying flat on our backs in a mock-up of Apollo 8 to see film of that mission. And so, we closed the museum out.

After Patriots Point, we headed what I thought would be a short distance to an amusement place with mini-golf and go-karts and games. It turned out the map I was using didn’t have an obvious scale, and it took about twenty minutes to get there. We waited about thirty minutes total to ride the go-karts (they only had seven). I had thought it would be fun to take advantage of the warm evening, and it was, but I hadn’t anticipated such a long wait.

We ended the evening by trying to find a restaurant that was not where the GPS said it would be, followed by one that was out of business, followed by one that was short-staffed and took about an hour to get us our food. There, the waitresses were nice and comped us almost all of our bill, so although it was a bit of a wait for the food, at least we got in an inexpensive meal.

And so ends our tour of Charleston. We will head back to Asheville tomorrow to go see the Biltmore Estate, and then head home on Thursday. Charleston was highly recommended to us, and it turned out to live up to expectations. Fun city.

Dubbs was in charge today, and after a quick breakfast (the place was open, but Meredith’s first choice was sold out, so her eatery streak continues), we headed over to Boone Hall Plantation, which is just outside of Charleston.

Boone Hall Plantation has a dramatic entrance, with a three-quarter-mile long dirt drive lined with huge live oaks. The oaks frame a classic-looking brick building with tall white columns holding the roof of the porch, but as classic as the house is, it was only built in the 1930s, replacing a rather ordinary-looking farm house. Still, the drive and the house are sufficiently picturesque that they were used in the 1980s mini-series North and South and also for the movie The Notebook. Both shows used the exterior only – the inside is very nice, but smaller than most people would expect from a “mansion,” as it only goes back a little ways (one large room wide on the main floor).

We got there about 9:30, so we hung around the house for the 10:00 tour. We passed much of the time wandering the flower gardens flanking each side of the front of the house. The gardens had brick paths that wound through many flower beds and trees, and while one side was being prepared to be planted with winter flowers, the other side was already done and so was largely in bloom.

The house tour took about thirty minutes, and only covered three main rooms on the ground floor. The house is still privately owned, and the family lives on the second and third floors. We saw a large library (with two grand pianos), the dining room, and a very pretty enclosed porch connected to the men’s smoking room. The entire downstairs was decked out for Christmas, and all smelled of pine from the multiple trees in the house. It was very pretty.

After the house, we made our way over to the the eight houses remaining from the slave quarters. They are now all small museums, showing how slave life was on the plantation, moving though the Civil War and emancipation into the Jim Crow laws of the late 1800s and 1900s, and then moving though the Civil Rights movement. It was very thoughtfully done.

We finished our time at Boone by taking a “trolley” ride (carts pulled by a tractor). It took us on a tour of much of the rest of the seven hundred acres of land the plantation still owns. The property is the oldest continuously worked farm in North America, having been settled in 1681. The land didn’t have enough fresh water to raise rice, which was very profitable, so they raised cotton instead until the late 1800s, when bigger and more modern plantations drove the price of cotton too low. The farm then switched over to pecan trees, and became the biggest pecan orchard east of the Mississippi. Pecan trees, it seems, have a shallow root system, so the grove was mostly wiped out by two hurricanes (one in the early 1900s and one in the 1980s). The farm now grows a variety of crops, employing ten farmers, and hosting multiple “U-pick” crops each season.

We drove back into downtown Charleston to go to the Gibbes Museum of Art. It is a small but well-laid-out museum of three floors. The top floor was given over to a featured artist who experimented with abstract paintings and collages. The second floor was largely given over to landscape artists who worked in and around the city, and the first floor was largely made up of portraits. There were a couple of rooms of French Impressionists as well. We spent a little over an hour at the museum.

We walked down the road a bit to try the dessert place Meredith had wanted to go to last night, and this time it was open. All three of us got fancy ice cream sandwiches, which we ate outside on a bench in the warm sunshine. We took advantage of the nice day to walk over to the main semi-open-air market, which is four blocks long, in roofed-in buildings. Inside, people were selling jewelry, food, clothing, toys, hats, art, and more. We may have taken advantage of fresh mini donuts (about the size of a quarter).

We headed back to the car, but got distracted by the Circular Congregational Church, a large circular church built in 1890, but with congregational roots back to the 1690s. I saw a still legible tombstone from the 1790s, so there has been a church here for some time. We spent a lot of time wandering around the churchyard trying to read inscriptions on tombstones.

That was about it. We went back home to rest, and then went out for pizza, where the guy warned us the wait time was about forty minutes because he was so busy. There only seemed to be two people working, and last night we were turned away from a half-empty restaurant due to staffing shortages. It made me wonder if this is going to be the way things will be for a time with the latest Covid surge. Still, we got fed, and the pizza was good.

That wrapped up Dubbs’ day today. I’m in charge tomorrow, which always makes me a little anxious to fill the day productively, but not exhaust us in the touring of things. It’s a fine balance to strike, but Charleston has been a fun and lively place to tour so far, so I think things will turn out okay.

Poor Meredith was in charge today, and she did her research. Despite that, the places she wanted to go for breakfast, supper, and dessert were all unexpectedly closed (despite what their websites said). But I still managed to have a very southern day, with biscuits, chicken, and pralines on my menu for the day.

The major sight we went to see today was an unqualified success, though. We drove out to Middleton Place, a rice plantation that had been with the Middletons for four generations, which included a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Even after the fourth Middleton passed away, the estate still stayed in the family, with the last private owner creating a non-profit foundation to care for the place in the 1970s.

The original plantation was huge – over ten square miles, and after trying several crops that didn’t pan out, the owner finally settled on rice, which grew very well and made the already wealthy Middletons even richer. Rice is a labor-intensive crop, so the plantation had at least one hundred slaves on the property. The historical placards around the grounds tried to give as much information on the enslaved population as historians have been able to uncover, as well as trying to cover the Middletons themselves and how rice was grown in the area.

The estate is gorgeous. The first Middleton decided to make the grounds his showpiece, and adapted French formal gardens to work for his terrain. The gardens are laid out such that the paths reveal the sights a little at a time because of limited sightlines. The rest of the garden always seems to be around the corner or behind a hedgerow.

The showstopper sight is the line where the main house used to stand (it was burned down at the end of the Civil War). The house looked over a long lawn that went down terraced grounds to two reflecting ponds that led the eye through the trees to the river that flowed in a line away from the house. And even in late December, there were still blooming shrubs and flowers about.

We did tour the remaining house structure – the main house used to be flanked by two smaller houses, and one of these was only damaged in the war, not destroyed. The Middeltons rebuilt that structure to live in as a home, and that was where someone lived until the 1970s. The house is pretty as it goes, made of red brick and two stories high, but is not especially grand. The house does have many Middleton furnishings and other possessions, including a pass that let a relative pass through the Union lines in the Civil War. It was signed by Abraham Lincoln, and is still preserved.

In addition to the self-guided tour of the grounds, we caught three guided tours – one on slaves on the plantation, one on the animals of the estate, and one on the history of the gardens themselves. Mer and I do love guided tours for the personal storytelling style they have.

And we did also get to pet one of the two kitties on the grounds. He was a very large tiger kitty who was very friendly. We also later saw an alligator. We did not determine if he was friendly.

We had lunch at the restaurant, which was not only open, but had the benefit of supporting the foundation to keep the estate up. We are always good at eating for a cause.

It was a perfect day, weather-wise, with lots of sun and temperatures in the seventies. The grounds had lots of shade, including many live oaks, which have huge canopies of leaves. So we were never hot, but enjoyed the warmth very much this late in the year.

We opened the place, getting there right at 9:00, and we almost closed it out, leaving around 4:30. I had seen some pictures online of Middleton Place, and I’m very glad we got to spend the day there. Spending a pretty day in beautiful surroundings is a very good thing indeed.

Merry Christmas! This was one of the more unusual ones I’ve ever had, in that we spent the morning packing up, left Asheville, and then drove the four or so hours to Charleston. It was an uneventful drive, during which we listened to an audio book of A Christmas Carol, which is quite witty in the narration.

We got situated in our Airbnb, which is in a newly constructed apartment/condo building that is quite swanky, with marble countertops, an open floor plan, and a beautiful outdoor pool that we will probably have to content ourselves with looking at (because of overnight temperatures in the fifties making the water quite cold). It’s a nice place, and while not within walking distance of downtown, it is within ten minutes or so of driving on neighborhood roads.

The one outing we took on this transition day was to go downtown, right down to an oceanfront park. It has an iconic fountain in the park in the shape of a pineapple, and wading in the fountain is encouraged. No one was today.

There were many women and girls out in fancy dresses, having their pictures taken. As far as I could tell, they were all Hispanic, so I’m not sure if this is a Hispanic culture custom or a southern thing. Either way, it was festive. Why not wear a pretty dress when Christmas day is seventy degrees and sunny?

While we were strolling the edge of the bay, we saw a disturbance out in the water that turned out to be two dolphins. We pretty much only saw the fins, but it was still exciting for those of us in landlocked cold lands. Later on, we saw another (or one of the same) dolphins much closer up, and sometimes it would arch its back out of the water. It was a nice welcome to Charleston.

Even the drive out of the downtown area was great. For whatever reason, Dubbs’ phone’s GPS sent us on a zigzag through about ten blocks of beautiful streets with picturesque homes. This looks like a good town in which to wander around, and we seem to have some good weather coming up in which to do so.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good (and warm!) night.

Today was my day to be in charge, so I fussed over a bunch of options. This area is pretty, so I wanted to do something  outside. I finally stumbled across a hike up a small mountain at the Carl Sandburg Home National Park that looked good. A hike up a mountain at the home of an important literary figure in the US? I get to hike, AND Meredith gets to see a book-related sight. Sign me up.

The park is about forty minutes away, so after breakfast at a local diner, we headed south. The walk from the parking lot is impressive – it looks across a pretty pond and up a hill at a white farmhouse, which is in a field surrounded by trees. We read some of the information about Carl (who was viewed as “the poet of the common people”) and his wife, Lilian, who was famous as an award-winning goat breeder, as well as having a master’s degree in literature.

We walked up the hill to the house, which is sadly closed right now because of Covid. We were able to walk around it, and then over to the goat barn, where not only did we get to see some of the descendants of goats that Lilian raised, but we also got to see two kitties, one of whom was friendly enough to come over and let us pet him. Good kitty.

Then, it was up the hill trail that would take us to the top of Glassy Mountain, a little over a mile away. It was a pleasant walk though a pine forest that had rhododendrons scattered about as well. The trail itself was not difficult, although it did climb steadily up, and the weather was quite warm (in the fifties). The trail leveled out at what looked to be the top, which was surrounded on all sides by trees. Dubbs and Mer had joked that if Mer was making the effort to climb all this way and didn’t get to see a view, I might not make it back down the trail. Happily for me, the trail continued on the ridge until it came to a bald area of rock where we had solid views of several layers of hills and mountains. Meredith, in honor of such a literary great as Sandburg, composed a haiku for the occasion:

Uphill’s a challenge,
but mountain layers are lovely.
Matt’s allowed to live.

The living Matt and crew made our way back down the mountain after a thirty-minute stay at the top.

We drove back into downtown Asheville after that, getting there a little after 3:00, to go to the (closed) Thomas Wolfe House, which is the museum and house where the American author Thomas Wolfe was raised. The museum very thoughtfully put out a QR code, which, when scanned, led us to seven different places around the grounds where it talked about Wolfe, the house, and his literature, all for free. We would have loved to see inside the house, but the audio guide was well done.

That wrapped up touring for the day. We walked a couple of blocks over to the art museum area, where we found an open Italian restaurant. After an excellent early (4:00) meal there, we headed home so we could have a mellow and restful Christmas Eve evening, maybe with streaming some services.

That will wrap up this tour of Asheville. The town did very well for itself, being a lively and walkable space with much to do. Tomorrow, we’ll close the book on the Asheville chapter and start in on the Charleston one.  Nicely done, Asheville!

Dubbs let us sleep in this morning before we headed out around 9:45 for breakfast at a diner. After that, we headed back into downtown Asheville, to go to the Asheville Art Museum, which is a small but pretty museum. It has four floors and a rooftop cafe area that has decent views of the mountains.

The museum mostly focused on the twentieth century, and featured regional artists. One section was dedicated to self-taught artists of varying quality, which I found interesting. Usually museums I have been to feature top-notch work from unusually talented self-taught artists, but some of the work here was what ordinary people who were dedicated could produce. The museum still treated that art seriously, which was refreshing to see.

I enjoyed the museum very much, but can’t describe too many of the works – being modern, many were abstract. One that I do remember was one for which an artist fed flies sugar water with dye in it and let the flies poop on a canvas. It was actually an interesting piece, but I’m not sure how much credit the artist gets in that work (except as maybe “found” art?). Ewwwwww.

The museum also had a painting by Zelda Fitzgerald, who was married to the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was quite good – it looks to me that she had talent and some training.

After our high-brow encounter with art, we swung by a chocolate store and then Ben and Jerry’s for “lunch,” and proceeded back to the Pinball Museum, where we successfully got into the building today. It was a fun couple of hours, although I did verify my long-held feeling that I am much better at video games than I am at pinball. I stank it up at pinball today. Mer had some good rounds of pinball and played some video games, including Burger Time, which she loved as a preteen on an Intellivision gaming system that her grandparents had for the grandchildren. I was most successful at playing the original Star Wars game. That was a good time. Dubbs floated around both pinball and video games, seeming to do well at both.

We were about a block away from the Basilica of St. Lawrence, which we wanted to tour. Unfortunately for us, the basilica was closed today, except for the mass schedule, because of Christmas week. So we’ll have to check that out next time.

We headed back to the car after a detour through a small art “mall,” where many styles of art were for sale. I loved the stained glass, but there were interesting pieces in decorative metal, photography, paint, and more. Once back at the car, we went home so Dubbs could grab a nap before supper.

Supper was at a barbeque place in Biltmore Village, around 7:00. Biltmore Village is the small village next to the Biltmore estate, and is now mostly a shopping area. We strolled around the streets looking at the Christmas lights, and even detoured into a Christmas shop that was open. Afterwards, we headed home for the evening.

So we covered modern high art, modern video game art, and consumer art. I guess we artfully dodged about today. Asheville continues to be a fun place to be, and the weather was beautiful again. Here is to tomorrow and the plans I have to make tonight!

While Ye Olde Blog is usually saved for international travel, Covid has changed the vacation landscape enough that even domestic trips are exciting now. Plus, Aunt Mary asked to “travel along with us” this time, so away we go.

Mer and I didn’t go anywhere at Thanksgiving this year because of Covid concerns – we weren’t sure what Europe was going to do, and so we didn’t want to buy tickets too far ahead, which then turned into not buying tickets at all. So we decided to get away with our usual Thanksgiving travel companion, Dubbs, but at Christmastime instead.

We wanted somewhere new (to us) and warm, so we picked Asheville, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina. After an uneventful travel day yesterday, we had a full day of touring today, with Meredith being in charge.

We had breakfast at a Waffle House near our morning destination, the North Carolina Arboretum. An arboretum in winter may seem a bit of an odd choice since nothing would be in bloom, but we find winter hiking a good change of pace – with the leaves down from the trees, you can see more in the woods. In this case, that meant often getting to see some of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

We spent a couple of happy hours there, and it wasn’t too cold unless you got caught in the active wind. Since most of our time was in the woods, in a valley, or both, the cold was manageable. We wandered around the garden area, which was decorated for Christmas. That helped make up for the lack of flowers. Mer even decided to get tickets to come back at night to see the gardens all decorated with lights.

We followed various trails around to get a flavor of the area. My favorite was the rhododendron garden. The plants were still green and in leaf, the trail sometimes went though rhododendron tunnels, the paths were freshly mulched, and it was all next to a very clear stream. Lovely.

After the arboretum, we drove over to downtown Asheville, where we got a late lunch at a Mexican place. Dubbs wanted to make sure we could still get tickets for the local art museum, so we walked over there. After being assured we could get into the museum tomorrow, we went back to an ice cream shop after Dubbs may have dropped a hint or two.

We then walked five or six blocks, passing several hardy buskers along the way. Asheville has about ninety thousand people, putting it between Canton and Akron in size, but it was much more happening than either of those downtowns, even with this being a work day in December. We ended up at the Asheville Pinball Museum, which is a lofty name for a place where you can pay to play seventy pinball and arcade games from our youth. Sadly (and wisely), the folks who run the museum limit numbers, and so had a two-and-a-half-hour wait time. But they also ran the next-door Movie Poster Museum (free, with the hope that you would buy a poster or two), or you could pay a dollar to see the Lunchbox Museum. We did both, which were fun strolls down memory lane.

We went back home to rest a bit before heading out around 7:15 to go back to the arboretum to see the lights. The wait and the drive were worth it. The garden area is small, but was filled to the brim with lights, including a huge “tree” made of a cone of lights that could change colors and make shapes up and down the tree in the lights. We, of course, saw the entire thing. They had an extensive miniature train set with two running trains, which included a “river” of blue lights and white “rapids.” There was a quilt made of lights that were synched to music. There were multiple arches of lights, illuminated trees, wrapped trees, and even a lit-up unicorn. I accidently happened to get a shot of the unicorn barfing up a rainbow. I was delighted by the mistake.

It took us a bit over an hour to see all of the lights, and then we headed back home for the night. Tomorrow is Dubbs’ day to be in charge, so we shall see what shall come of that. So far, Asheville has lived up to the hype.

Shockingly, we got to our gate almost three hours early, so I have a chance to jot down some random thoughts about the trip.

Iceland is amazingly beautiful. Meredith really did keep talking about “Iceland 360” – that whatever you were looking at, odds were excellent that if you turned around, the new view would be grand as well. To cram lava fields, volcanoes, waterfalls everywhere, glaciers, many different kinds of mountains, fjords, seascapes, rivers and streams, rolling hills, cute towns and villages, and more into a country the size of Maine makes for a remarkable trip.

Roads here can be very bad. You can read that the roads are bad. You can understand that the roads will be bad. But it can still be a shock when you drive on, some days, dozens of miles of unpaved roads. Experience is quite the teacher. To be fair, the paved roads were all excellent. Some unpaved roads were excellent. Some were not. Almost no roads had guardrails. I suspect that to put guardrails everywhere they are needed would bankrupt the country.

Sheep are everywhere. Somehow, there are fences along almost all the roads. I think it is to keep the sheep from getting into the verdant fields of grass and keep them pinned to the side of the road. The car and I had three close encounters of the sheep kind in two weeks.

I never had a bad interaction with an Icelander. They seem a laid-back and helpful people, and everyone spoke at least some English. Which is good, because I’ve not quite managed “pakka per fyrir” (thank you) yet.

Long hours of daylight are a blessing, but confusing. I kept being surprised that it was 11:00 pm when the sun “told” me it was 8:00.

Iceland tries hard to protect the environment, and rightly so. It does have some amusing aspects, though. On many trails, there was a clothesline-style rope (thin) strung at shin height to remind people not to walk off the trail and to keep the fragile plant life in good health. But, since many of the trails involved heights, it also gave the illusion that these were the safety barriers to keep you from falling. At shin height. Where you can trip. My best guess is that it was the safety railing for the secret people (elves).

I know we are a product of our cultures, but I can’t get used to the sight of cold herring for breakfast. I went for ham and cheese (early on) or toast (later on). I get a pass on cultural eating because I tried preserved shark.

I ended up driving about 2,800 miles in fifteen days. That’s a lot. But, if you want to see sights all around the country, you have to drive to see them. I wouldn’t want all vacations to involve about four hours in the car every day, but it worked for this one. I wouldn’t have wanted to cut anything out from what we did (although the three-hour canyon detour was rough).

We didn’t get to do everything we wanted to do. The next Iceland trip needs to include whale watching, getting onto a glacier, going into the central highlands, riding an Icelandic pony, doing more Reykjavik exploration, seeing an active eruption (if one was going on), taking more scenic hikes, exploring the Eastfjords more, and other things. There is much to do here!

Icelandic ponies are handsome horses. They are larger that what we thought ponies generally were, but shorter than normal horses. They really do have a funny trot that you can see (they raise their legs higher than normal, I think, and they curl their front legs up on each stride). They have long, beautiful manes and tails.

We only ever saw two or three boats out on the ocean. That seemed odd for an island country. The harbors always had boats and ships in them. Maybe they only went out after we went to bed.

We never saw any crops growing. All the fields were grass, which we saw being harvested all over the country. Either wheat does not grow in Iceland, or the marauding bands of sheep get it all.

I love all the hot water. Not only does it make for bubbling pools in the ground, but it allowed me to take long, guilt-free showers. The cold water was great too – we had great, clean, cold tap water everywhere we went. Restaurants and cafes had it out just for the taking. That is not always the case in Europe, so we appreciated that.

I’m sure I’ll think of many other things over the next few weeks. It was a full and wonderful time in Iceland.

All cold things must come to an end, and so today was our last full touring day in Iceland, with our exploring the capital city, Reykjavik. Weather was again an issue today, with misting rain in the late morning turning to steady rain by early afternoon. And in the late afternoon and evening, when the rain had stopped, we were met with twenty-five-mile-an-hour winds which cut through my three layers of clothing enough to make me uncomfortable. Still, the touring must go on, for we have no touring tomorrow!

Meredith is a big fan of Rick Steves’ tour books, and for major cities, he usually has what we term a “Rick Walk.” Rick starts you somewhere in the city and walks you along interesting streets to see the major sights that are within walking distance of each other. There was one of those for Reykjavik, so that was how we spent the late morning and early afternoon.

The walk started down by the old harbor in a small square where people think the first settler of Iceland built his farm about eleven hundred years ago. Archaeologists have found evidence of a farm near that area dating from the right period, so it seems a good guess. From there we wandered through a back alley of a residential area. Reykjavik has about 130,000 people, so it’s a little smaller than Akron (at 190,000). It’s hard to imagine being in the main downtown part of Akron and wandering one block away to find cute little houses, but I guess that is what happens when you take one thousand years to grow to a city.

We got to see city hall, situated on a small, pretty pond; given the wind and the rain, we passed on the mile-long walk around the pond. We went on to the Alpingi parliament building where the sixty-three members meet. There is a very lovely park with flowers just outside the building where it would be pleasant to sit on nice days. The chairs were empty today, but the space was still nice.

When we got to the start of the modern main street around 11:30, we headed back to the car. Meredith wanted to go somewhere else, and as the precipitation was now a full and steady rain, I was happy to oblige. We both knew that the forecast had the weather clearing up around 3:00, so we could come back later.

We didn’t have a GPS (ours won’t download the Iceland map because the format changed), and we don’t have functional cell phones to use as a GPS, so this whole trip has been old-school – maps, sometimes supplemented by Google directions. Mer had looked up where we were going on Google, so even though it was off all of our maps, we headed out.  On trips, we take turns being in charge on different days, and we generally don’t tell the other person what we’ve planned; because this was Mer’s day, I wasn’t sure what our destination would be, but Mer said it wouldn’t be too far away.

After driving for awhile, we saw an exit with a name that might have been an abbreviation of the road we were looking for. We drove on for a bit, and then decided to turn around. This is never easy in Iceland. I think Icelanders have designed roads for traffic flow at the cost of all other considerations. This means that if you see, say, a gas station off of a main road, there will rarely be access to the gas station from said main road. You are expected to know on which side road to get off to get to the entrance. Making turning around even harder is the fact that many main roads dump onto other main roads which dump onto other main roads which have no left turns into the only driveway on the west coast.

We eventually did manage to turn around and went back the other way looking for the exit. We never saw it. So we had to manage another turnaround. The exit turned out to be only on one side of the main road. Fair enough. We got off on the new road, which didn’t look right, since it dumped us into a rotary and the real road was supposed to be a merge instead. We saw a gas station, so we thought we would ask there. I turned into the driveway of the gas station, only to be directed on a one-way street back onto the highway.

We turned around again and repeated the process, this time finding the elusive way in. The clerk behind the counter was very helpful and drew us a map. Off we went. Another challenge to driving in Reykjavik is that you have to decide which turn lane to be in well before you can see any street signs. We got the right street, going the wrong way. Execute difficult turnaround procedure. We got to the next right street, going the wrong way. Execute difficult turnaround procedure. We finally got to our destination, which was a block of apartment buildings. I admit that I was stumped.

Meredith had found a house church to go to. It’s a church plant, but the “plant” part of the church was interrupted by Covid, so they have been meeting virtually and as a small group, waiting for when they can actually open a building. The church pastor and his wife are both Americans who felt that God was calling them to minister in Iceland, and so the service was in English. There were fourteen of us – mostly Americans, with a couple of Germans, an Icelander, and one or two people whose nationality I didn’t catch.

It was a good service, and it was good to be back in a church gathering again after two weeks on the road. The pastor spoke on Psalm 96 and how worship is a lifestyle and not just what we do on Sundays, and also a call to mission activity to those around us. We sang two hymns and said the Apostles’ Creed and took communion. Meredith and I hung around after the service for about thirty minutes, chatting mostly with the pastor.

After church, it was back into the city, where the rain had stopped. We started with going to a donut shop the pastor had recommended. It was a good recommendation. We then walked back to pick up the Rick Walk from where we had left off.

It basically took us up the main shopping drag/tourist gauntlet, up the hill to the city’s iconic church. The church façade is designed to look like basalt columns, which works well. The inside of the church is unadorned – clear glass windows and no decoration of any kind (other than one corner chapel where there is a painting of the Madonna and child, which was surprising to me to find in a Lutheran church). The interior’s simplicity is harmonious and makes for a reverent atmosphere. Which was broken by a man shouting, “We are closing!” It was 5:00, and so we had just made it into the church with only about ten minutes to spare.

From the church, we went down a side street into a sculpture garden. An Icelandic artist had made a deal with the Alpingi that if they built him a house and studio, he would leave all future work to the people. They did, and he did, so there are about twenty or thirty sculptures from around 1910 to 1950 in the garden, drawing on Icelandic myths and sagas and also bringing in aspects of Christianity. Most of the sculptures focused on only two or three figures, and so felt very intimate. It was in a walled-off garden, so not only was it peaceful, but it shielded us from the wind as well. I loved it.

From the garden, we walked down to the harbor to see the famous sculpture Sun Voyager. That was within easy walking distance of the opera house, which was finished about 2010 and critically well-received, even if some locals were critical of the cost. We got back to the general area of the car, which coincidently was parked next to the city’s Icelandic Phallological Museum; thus I was able to point it out to an older lady who was asking people for directions to it. I wasn’t going to judge her for going as long as she didn’t ask me how I knew so quickly where it was.

Mer decided to extend the walk a bit by going back to look at the pond at city hall now that the rain had stopped. When we got there, we both laughed at how the small pond had actual one-foot waves on it from the gusting wind. We took that as a sign to go get dinner back by the hotel. The restaurant Meredith wanted to go to was closed for the owner being on vacation, so we settled for the very un-Icelandic solution of Subway instead. At least Meredith was able to try corn on her sandwich, and so it felt a little exotic.

And so closed the Iceland touring. Back in the hotel, we repacked everything and got as ready for tomorrow as we could. We will aim to be up by 5:30 to be at the airport at 8:00 to return the car – if you go over even a little on another day, you get charged the full $120 for the extra time. Our flight leaves at 11:20, and we get back to Newark around 1:30 local time. It will be good to get home and see family, friends, and kitties, as well as get back to a routine. Touring Europe is exciting and tiring at the same time. Home is where the purr is.