Day 6 – Rainy Day Blues

We had big plans for today. We were going to drive up to Linville Falls and do either the Hawksbill or Table Rock hike around the Linville Gorge. It was going to be fantastic. Instead, we woke up to rain. Not the storms that we get in Kansas, but just a light steady rain all day.

So for our last full day, we decided we would just hang out in Asheville for the majority of the day. We headed off toward Biltmore Estate, the largest privately owned home in the U.S.. We didn’t really see the need to tour the house or anything but figured it’d be fun to drive through the grounds and see everything on the outside. To our surprise though, you can’t get further than a short drive down the road before tickets are required. I looked it up to see how much tickets were and whether there were cheaper tickets to be able to just drive through. Nope. $60 per person. Take it or leave it. We left it. So this is the only picture we got on our little journey to Biltmore:

At this point, restaurants were starting to open up for lunch, so we decided on Nine Mile again, since it had been our favorite thus far in the trip. It did not disappoint. We are both apparently big fans of Caribbean food.

Then we had to figure out how we would waste time until dinner. I had heard there was shopping to be had at Grove Arcade. It ended up not really being our thing, but we had a pleasant enough time wandering around the various shops.

Afterward, we parked downtown and walked around and did some more shopping. We walked into Mast General Store and decided it’d be the perfect place to waste some time. I have a weakness for outdoors gear. Anthony also has a weakness for outdoorsy everything. And water bottles apparently. Because he’s lame like that.

Somehow we were able to talk ourselves out of most things for the time being, but we did walk out of there over an hour later with a nice new flannel for me and balloons for Anthony (don’t ask).

We definitely deserved to reward ourselves for our frugality, so on to Wicked Weed for some beers we went. And then more shopping.

For dinner, I was set on doing Curate, which is the #1 recommended restaurant in Asheville, and I had been saving it for our last evening. That was apparently a bad idea since it’s closed on Mondays. Figures.

We crossed the street to White Duck Taco instead, where the guy taking our orders was also a vegetarian and had great recommendations for me. I ordered the Gaucho taco and then also the Thai Chicken taco with gaucho instead of chicken, and both were delicious. It was also by far our cheapest meal of the trip, so I’ll go ahead and consider it a win even though we missed out on Curate.

On our way back to the car, we stopped in at Double D’s coffee shop. The name makes sense when you see it since it’s a coffee shop inside of an old double-decker bus. Cute idea, and I thoroughly enjoyed my chai latte there, although there was a loud couple next to us talking about their drug selling history which was very difficult to not eavesdrop on.

We went out for a glass of wine on our deck when we got home, and ooh’d and ahh’d looking at the clouds below us. The rest of the evening we’ve got big plans of chilling next to our cozy fireplace.

We head home tomorrow, but I have a feeling this won’t be the last we see of Asheville and its surrounding areas.