Buncombe County

Today we discovered ihop, a chain of pancake houses recommended to us as having great food at a very reasonable cost. There was a good menu with every sort of pancake you imagine plus other stuff like eggs, bacon and hash browns – mmm yummy! We had a delicious eggs, bacon and hash brown breakfast there and the bill was half the cost of the breakfast at the hotel. Will definitely be making more visits there again. We left Atlanta on the Interstate and Peter enjoyed opening up the Mustang, delighting in the throaty roar of the engine as she took off, easily overtaking the Big Mac lorries and slower drivers on the Interstate. The plan today was to drive to Asheville, our preference was to avoid the interstates and use the more local and A roads so as soon as we could we left the interstate and picked up Highway 19. It makes us smile to see the signs or hear TomTom refer to the roads for a lot of them have pseudonyms and are known by several different numbers and each sign lists them all whilst TomTom takes ages to announce all the numbers the roads go by. The weather hasn’t been kind to us, it has been raining pretty much all the time we have been here so we haven’t had a chance to put the top down on the mustang yet. The A roads were very pretty and wound way up into the Smokey Mountains, into the low cloud covering them. At some points the bends in the road were very extreme with steep cambers so when you looked ahead you could see crazy winding roads that seemed to lurch wildly one way and another like some Dr Seuss cartoon. Low cloud obscured many of the views but we could see enough to appreciate the vast beauty of the area with umpteen waterfalls and huge ranges of forests. It would be quite spectacular had the weather been better and we had been able to see further. We made a stop in Bryson City to stretch our legs, grab a drink and free wifi and book a room for the night. It was a fascinating little town – not a city by our standards, more like a small town. They have a steam railway which does trips into the mountains – sadly there isn’t another one running until the weekend and we won’t be here then. Americans still struggle with the very English notion of tea, they are all about coffee. One bakery tea shop offered a selection of fruity teas and Earl Grey, which they thought was a plain black tea and were surprised when we told them it was scented. We found a spit and sawdust billiard hall with a genial host which had a great selection of Twining’s teas and settled down in a couple of rough wooden chairs and a scuffed leather topped table to browse the internet and find a bed for the night. We used Hotel Tonight and Booking.com apps which both seemed to have good offers and settled on Holiday Inn which turned out to be a lovely place with very comfortable rooms. Feeling tired after our long drive we stayed in hotel to eat. The food was delicious, I had salmon with a buttery citrus sauce whilst Peter opted for a rib-eye steak with blue cheese topping.

We have a travelling kettle which happens to be an American one – we bought it years ago in Las Vegas when we couldn’t find anywhere that did a decent brew. Again it has proved invaluable as all the hotels seem only to have coffee making machines in the rooms. The only drawback is that it’s a whistling kettle so when it boils it emits a screeching whistle which would waken the dead and doesn’t have an automatic off switch – it keeps going until its unplugged! This then results in one or both of us frantically racing to grab the cord and pull it out of the wall, invariably if we are sitting in bed one foot gets caught in the covers so we end up sprawling across the bed and floor scrabbling to reach the kettle cord whist the kettle carries on with its ear-splitting noise. Bet the people in the room next door wonder what on earth is going on!Read more