There's no place like home...or is there?

Yay! Fall mountain trip is over! I never thought I'd be happy to come back from vacation, but there it is. Four days, three nights, a leaky bathroom, crying babies, snoring men and a 6 1/2-hour drive later, we are finally home. For all the bad things we could say about High Hampton there are that many good ones, so I guess I'll leave it at that. Pictures will come soon, and maybe they can do the scenery some justice, though I doubt it. But I will say this: if you ever go, take an alarm clock, a really warm sweater and lots of patience. Also, bring your kids or grandkids. What's that? Don't have any of those? Ohhhh. Probably not the place for you, then.

On to more fun things: white pumpkins! I love them and have really only seen them in Martha Stewart Living (complete with perfect jack-o-lantern faces) or faux versions in the Pottery Barn catalog. Up in the mountains, white pumpkins were everywhere and they looked beautiful. We brought a couple home, and I must say, next to my regular ol' orange pumpkin and my white mums, they make quite the front porch. Plus they were cheap! Can't beat that. Among my other mountain purchases were lots of Christmas presents, hallelujah. During our day trip to Hendersonville, we wandered over to Flat Rock and The Wrinkled Egg, my absolute favorite gift shop in the whole world, which I've been visiting since the 90's. I don't know whether I bought cheap stuff or whether Smithfield really has a high opinion of itself, but I didn't spend nearly what I usually do and I wound up with 7 gifts and two fun Christmas-y things for me. Gotta love that.

Speaking of loving things, Brian Baker fell in love with Hendersonville. So much so that we came home with real estate listings and Pepsi plant information. No, we're not moving. Not today, anyway...but I suppose you shouldn't ever dismiss possibilities, and apparently that's a new one. We rode by the old house, missing its basketball goal and front-yard juniper, but aside from that, not much has changed. Downtown looked spectacular in the fall, as it always does. The high school has freshly-painted "2008" senior stairs and a new fence around the football field. Lots of new development has cropped up, but Jump-off Rock (which BB called "jumping rock" the whole time) and Laurel Park that surrounds it have been spared. On an interesting note, there was a couple getting married at Jump-off when we drove up. I thought it was odd, considering that it was Friday afternoon at 2:30pm, but hey, who am I to say?

All in all, the mountains still felt like home. I guess anywhere you live for a while feels like that, but a little part of me was still sad to leave.