We'll be coming 'round the mountain...

It's Thursday afternoon, and we're drinking afternoon tea in the lobby of the High Hampton main lodge. Brian's watching CNBC on the Inn's only television, and I'm lusting over my WiFi connection that it's only taken two days to get. We're here! And connected! I don't think either of us realized how addicted we are to our technology until we didn't have it.

We left yesterday at 5:30am for Asheville. Both of us were exhausted after Tuesday; Staff Development Day got the best of me (and yay! it wasn't a disaster!) and Brian had class until 10:30pm. But we got up and got on the road, and we were at Biltmore by 10:30am. My, how I'd forgotten the October mountain crowds. Inside the house was shoulder-to-shoulder, all the way up to the 4th floor. (Poor BB tried to calm me down when my claustrophobia turned to full-on panic on a back staircase.) The day was perfect though, cool with not a cloud in the sky. We lunched at the Stable Cafe on some good-but-overpriced sandwiches and checked out all the scarecrows and pumpkins set up for their Harvest Celebration.

Next we were off to High Hampton - a long, windy trip up a mountain past Brevard. By the time we got here, our patience was in short supply, as was the customer service. Today's been much better, but life at High Hampton takes some getting used to. The cottages around the property are off little gravel paths and are both up and downhill, which makes for an interesting trip when you're trying to unload your luggage. There are little handcarts (which look to us like rickshaws, insert Seinfeld joke here) to use, but once you load your suitcases on, they weigh about as much as a car. And then you have to move them.

Our room is in the Lake Cottage, which overlooks a wooded area off the lake. We have a porch with three rocking chairs and, oddly enough, a daybed. What we don't have is an alarm clock, phone, tv or cell service, which we though we could do without...until we got neighbors next door. Originally these cottages were used by the Hampton family and they apparently haven't been changed to accomodate strangers - you can hear everything. At 2:30 am, we heard the infant downstairs crying to be fed. At 3:00 pm, we heard, uh, the bathroom next door. And at 10-minute intervals throughout our stay, the family downstairs goes in and out of their screen porch door - and lets it slam behind them. Suffice it to say, it would be nice to have a little something to drown out the sounds, but that's the price you pay for a "peaceful mountain retreat" I suppose.

All of this is moot though, when you see the lake and the big giant rock-mountain that we don't know the name of. It's absolutely magnificent and we spent 2 hours today staring at it. The property is to die for, and despite being the youngest couple here by, oh, 30-40 years, people are still very friendly to us. Last night at dinner we met the cutest woman traveling by herself and we spoke to her again at breakfast. When we arrived at our table for lunch (all meals are at the same table for the duration of your stay), she had left for us a vase of dahlias she had picked from the HH dahlia garden and a note, saying that she enjoyed meeting us and was sorry her trip ended today. Friendly folks are harder and harder to come by now, sadly enough, and we were glad to meet her if only for a little while.

Off to Hendersonville tomorrow; more to come...