There are about a million things that I could say I love about Asheville, but I’m sure you guys don’t all want to read about nothing but Asheville. So, today is my last post (for now) on Asheville.
The Grove Park Inn is a 101-year-old hotel up in the mountains. It’s one of the top hotels and spas in the US and offers some really breathtaking views. The hotel itself, with the stone and rounded red roofs, remind me of a fairy-tale cottage… Like a giant home for fairies or something.
It was a bit of a dreary, wet day, in Asheville, but all of that seemed to melt away when we were standing in front of these massive stone fireplaces inside the lobby of the hotel. There is a row of rocking chairs set up in front of each of the two fireplaces and all we could talk about in there is how cozy it would be to sit there with a good book and read the rain away.
The views from the inn were incredible. The mountains, of course, were my favorite, but there is also a really amazing view of Asheville from up here (just a bit to the left of this photo).
The Grove Park Inn has been enjoyed by thousands of people throughout the last 101 years from F. Scott Fitzgerald (who wrote here for two years while Zelda was in an insane asylum in Asheville), Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Clinton, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller and many, many more! It’s absolutely amazing, and I would love to have the opportunity to stay here at some point in the future.
Another thing that we all did a lot of is eating out! Most of my meals were spent with Liz, Lina and Nick. We had an absolute blast eating everything from brunch to burgers toMexican food to Jamaican-American food! It was so yummy! The two photos above are from our brunch at Early Girl.
Asheville was voted as “Beer City, USA” in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012, finally being dethroned last year, but still maintained a top three spot. That being said, of course I had to have beer a couple of different places, but my favorite brewery was Highland Brewing Company. It’s just a laid-back atmosphere. There was live music, and you could bring our own food in with you. We had such a blast here, listening to the music, talking and laughing!
My last day in Asheville, Liz took me on a beautiful walking tour of part of downtown Asheville, and one of my favorite things I saw was the Grove Arcade. It is a really beautiful shopping area and is worth just walking into so you can see the inside of this beautiful building, but there are plenty of places to eat and shop if you’re trying to kill some time.
Liz, my friend from Be Love Live is the only reason I even made it to Asheville, NC. So, I loved being able to see things that she had written about. Liz also has another blog called The Fika Girl, where she started out by going to 40 different cafes 40 days in a row, and it was so much fun to follow, and gave me a whole Asheville Cafe Bucketlist! The one that I HAD to visit was The Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar. So, Liz and I stopped by there one morning after dropping Lina off at school, and got cider while we strolled through the book exchange! So. Much. Fun! I loved seeing where Liz’s dream started coming true, because The Fika Girl blog, grew into something wonderful, she has started writing for the Mountain Xpress, a newspaper in Asheville! So wonderful!
Above is the Flat Iron Building in Downtown Asheville.
This is Liz: Living her dream. She had written a post about going up these stairs to write for the Mountain Xpress, and I’m so proud of how far she has come and I’m excited to have been let in on this!
There are even bigger things to come from Asheville. As soon as I left, I knew I was in love with it: the city, the mountains, the people! So expect to hear a lot about Asheville because Liz and I are trying to work on collaborating in some way (while maintaining our own blogs), and I’m looking at making Asheville my home base sometime in the next 5 months or so… Yay!
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