Blue Ridge

We just got back last night from a long Memorial Day weekend in Blue Ridge, GA. We hadn't been away to anyplace besides our own house in Asheville for a while, but now that we've sold that place, we were pretty excited to go someplace new, even if Blue Ridge is only about an hour from Asheville.

The place we stayed was nice enough, nothing too spectacular but we were pleased that it a) was available to reserve the day before the weekend started and b) willing to take us with our three dogs. It's not unlikely that the truth of a) influenced the possibility of b). But it was fine, and the true joy was that all the little things we noticed wrong with the place - the breaker trips too easily on the hot tub and so on - weren't things that we would have to fix ourselves. Hooray for renting!

We went kind of last minute and without much of a plan, so we were also pleasantly surprised to find that we were able to reserve two spots on a whitewater rafting trip for Saturday late on Friday afternoon. (Our guide suggested the economy and/or gas prices is looking to take a pretty bite out of business this year.) It was on the Ocoee, which we'd heard was nice but didn't know much about - it turned out to be about the most fun trip we've taken. Not as psychotic and potentially fatal as the Upper Gauley we did last year, which was good because at our advanced age it seems more fun to not be literally fearing death at every turn.

The Ocoee, which is the southeastern corner of Tennessee, was probably even prettier than the Gauley in West Virginia, which is no slouch scenery wise. Probably the coolest thing about the Ocoee, though, is that it's where they ran the whitewater events during the 1996 Olympics. Apparently they spent about $50 million redesigning a quarter-mile stretch of the river to make the ideal rapids, but because of the dam release schedules now that section is only available to raft a few days out of the year, and we happened to be there for one of them. They also built up really nice trails and viewing areas, so we also spent pretty much the whole next day there watching the carnage. Good cheap entertainment.

One tip to keep in mind for those of you planning your own vacation in Blue Ridge - bring your own food. We encountered at least three completely incompetent servers over the course of a three day weekend, the choicest being our Pizza Hut waitress on Sunday night. We'd tried to go to dinner at a riverside restaurant about 20 minutes away that had been recommended to us, only to find when we got there that the entire population of the county was there ahead of us in line. So we drove back to town, only to find that the reason the whole county was at the first place was because there was literally no place else open to eat except Pizza Hut. And at that Pizza Hut, the special of the night was "waiting half an hour for your Cheesy Bread appetizer, only to see your waitress deliver it to the wrong table." So we left, and bought a frozen pizza from the grocery story.

On the plus side, by the time we actually got it all the way back to the cabin and cooked, we were starving, so it was delicious!