Asheville Adventure List

As I drive all over Western North Carolina on various shoots and excursions I keep seeing things I want to come back and see, taste, experience, take pictures of (for myself). So I have decided to compile a list of all the things I would like to see, taste, experience, and take pictures of this summer. A few of the things on this list I've already done, but I'll add them by virtue of the fact that if I hadn't done them yet, they would be on here anyways.

I'm stealing this idea somewhat from the lovely and creative Rachel Armstrong, who, preceding her very recent relocation to Seattle, made an NC bucket list and checked items off as she went. So, following is my current compilation of all the things I would like to do while in the mountains for the summer, based off what I have been told by various people and things I've found on my own. It's pretty long, and I most likely won't hit all of the items on it, but I'll do my level best.

·      Places

o   NC Arboretum

o   WNC Nature Center

o   WNC Farmer’s Market

o   Asheville City Tailgate Market

o   Downtown Hendersonville

o   Used bookstores on Lexington

o   Biltmore Estate Tour (Mom and Dad?)

·      Food!

o   Early Girl Eatery

o   Zambra

o   Have a caffeinated drink at every coffee shop I can find

o   Asheville Food Tour

o   Dine al fresco at a sidewalk café downtown

o   Tea at the Biltmore

o   Have a float at the Woolworth’s lunch counter

·      Backpacking/Hiking trips

o   Huntfish Falls

o   Hike Craggy Gardens

o   Hike Mt. Mitchell

o   Triple Falls, Dupont State Forest

o   Sliding Rock

o   Blueberry Picking at Graveyard Fields (August)

·      Events and Activities

o   Show at the Orange Peel

o   Bele Chere Music Festival

o   Asheville Trolley Tour

o   Mass at the Basilica of St. Laurence

o   Drum circle

o   Movie at the Brew n’ View

o   Paint pottery at Fired Up

o   Attend a poetry or book reading at Malaprops Bookstore

Got anything I should add? Let me know!

Adventure Sunday, round 2

Hard to believe two whole weeks have passed since the last Adventure Sunday post. Time flies!

To celebrate this Sunday, I had plans with Holly to visit the Western North Carolina Farmer's Market, an established, year-round farmer's market with everything from t-shirts and hats to goat cheese and honey, with fresh produce and homemade fudge in between. My word.

Unfortunately, she had to cancel at the last minute, but I was fortunate enough to run into a friend from school, Lindsay at the church we both happened to be visiting this morning and got her and her friend Hannah to come with me instead!

So off we went.

We spent an hour or so exploring the tables of yummy homemade, grown, and baked goods, and I left with a loaf of apple cider bread (homemade apple cider instead of water in the dough!), garlic and herb chevre, and a quart of some of the most delicious peaches I have ever had in my life. As I think about the homemade (see a trend here?) peach ice cream Laura and I are dutifully stirring every 30 minutes in the freezer downstairs, I know it was a successful trip to be sure.

PEACHES! My favorite summer fruit :)

On Assignment

Guess where I am right now? Just guess. Ok, I'll tell you. I'm sitting in a coffee shop. Blogging. What whaaaat? I swear the whole artsy, slightly hipster, espresso drinks and writing sad poems culture here is beginning to rub off on me. Oh well.

Malaprops is kind of becoming my second home. By why shouldn't it be? Coffee, books, sometimes music, all rolled into one? What's not to love? And as I said before, they don't even kick you out when you read their books without paying for them first. For a broke starving college student, this is a check plus.

(Says the girl who will most likely spend her summer's earning on espresso drinks. Again, oh well.)

I had my first real assignment for WNC today. My fellow photo intern, Jarret, and I embarked on an hour-long road trip to the Crimson Laurel Gallery in Bakersville, NC to take photos for the "Spaces" section of next month's issue. It was so fun! The town has a population of 400 and 1 in 5 residents identify themselves as artists. How cool is that? And to top it off, I convinced Jarret to let me second shoot with him on a wedding next Saturday. So excited!!!

I actually felt like I was doing something that, not only I might be doing for the rest of my life to some extent, but that I could actually endure as my "9-5". We took some personality portraits of the two owners and got detail shots of the gallery itself. Here's one of my favorites....

Can I just say it is absolutely incredible to finally be doing something that will actually make a difference for my future? This isn't math class, I'm not learning how to write a well-rounded conclusion or pick apart a poem that doesn't mean what the professor thinks it means. I'm out in the world, on my own, taking pictures of things.

And I could be doing this for the rest of my life.





Yes. Yes please.

Playing Catch-up

Hello intrepid readers. I apologize for the long absence, but I decided that blogging while under the influence of hard drugs was probably not a good idea. So to catch you up, on Thursday I had all 4 of my wisdom teeth removed and spent the next few days lying around in a haze of percocet, pain, and Justin Beiber's Never Say Never, the movie. Yes I did, I'm sorry. I was under the influence.

When I came out of anesthesia, apparently there were two things I fixated on, which I of course, have no memory of. One was whether or not I was going to be allowed to eat macaroni and cheese. Very very important. The other was why my boyfriend was not by my side, as I was convinced he has promised he would be there, despite the face that he's across the country in California. I was quite upset he had broken this imaginary promise. Oh well. At least I didn't do anything like this.


The day before that, I did my first engagement shoot! Bart and Jacqueline are getting married in August, have been dating for four years and have known each other for 16! As Jacqueline put it as we were getting set up, "I realized the other day I've known Bart longer than I've not known Bart." How wonderful to see this next step in their story unfold!

See the whole shoot on my photography page on Facebook, here, and 'Like' the page, while you're at it :)

This past weekend, the last Stotts graduated from Woods. It's the end of an era people. And thankfully the end of high school graduations for the most part (the ceremony was nearly 3 hours long, no joke).

Baby Lucy was excited.

And now, I have returned to Asheville, the land of photography internships and scooping ice cream at the Marble Slab Creamery.

 I got up yesterday early enough to spend some time on the back porch with an omlette, a mug of tea, and my creator. It was nice to slow down for a while and take time to pray and prepare for the day. Its strange that in all this free time I've had I haven't taken advantage of all the extra time I could be spending in the Word.





Not really strange actually, that's always been something I've struggled with. And this morning was a nice reminder of the wonderfulness of a good quiet time. And yes, that is a cookie you also see on the plate. So sue me.

I spent 5 hours yesterday shooting 5 bottles of wine and 2 CD's and let me tell you, that lighting stuff is hard. Looks like most of my summer is going to be spent in that upstairs hallway with hot shop lights that inexplicably smell like fish, making micro adjustments to light power, tripod heights, and camera angles. We all gotta start somewhere.

My setup. Notice how the light tent is balanced on foam core board, a tripod, and a stack of magazines. Welcome to WNC Magazine :P

 

I had a couple hours to kill between the magazine and the Marble Slab, so I wandered around downtown some more, got some ridiculously overpriced yet incredible delicious strawberry lemonade from the Green Sage Cafe, and accidentally fell asleep in one of their cushy chairs. Oh well.

 Then I spent 6 hours at the Marble Slab, and kept having La Vita Dolce flashbacks. Fabian made waffle bowls today, and I thought the light through the steam looked so cool.

 

Sorry there's so much in this one post. Guess that's what happens when I slack off.
Stay tuned for potential tales of mason jar cheesecake and photographic adventure to an old art gallery with the other photo intern tomorrow.

Peace and Blessin's.

Adventure Sunday

Today was the first of a hopefully longstanding and wonderful tradition of Adventure Sundays. As those will be the only day of the week that I'm sure to have totally free, Holly and I decided we would do our level best to find a new adventure every Sunday after church.

Today's adventure: Downtown.

Yes yes. I've done this already, I know, but this time I actually took pictures and did something other than sit in Malaprops and read!

(We did do that for a while though. What can I say? This book is addicting.)

Then we went and checked out World Coffee Cafe, where I had this lovely cappuccino and some much-needed caffeine. And while sitting there waiting for Laura to join us, we saw a purple pigeon? What? 

 Sorry for the blurry picture, it was running for its life from a small child. When your brain is the size of a pea its easy to forget you have wings I guess.

I've never seen a pigeon like it before.

We found an excellent people-watching spot, right in the window, and just relaxed for a while. 

This guy thought he was Buddha or something. I told Holly to pretend like I was taking a picture of her so I could capture the moment and not look like a creeper. 

Oh look! I actually was taking a picture of her! She's so pretty :)

After a while there, where we were joined by Laura and her friend Riley, we headed to Pack's Tavern for diner where I had the best BLT I've ever had in my life. I need to start grilling the bread of all my sandwiches with butter before constructing them. Fried green tomatoes too. SO good!

And to top off the evening, Laura and I went home and baked banana chocolate chip pecan oatmeal cookies, and decided to start a cooking blog. Check it out here, at http://soon2be2fatladies.blogspot.com/ . Yeah, that name is no joke. We're making plans to add a workout regimen to our list of adventures as well. 

Speaking of which, stay tuned for my Asheville Adventure List, which I will be compiling most likely while under the influence of heavy sedation and painkillers after surgery later this week. Get excited.

I ended this wonderful day with a couple hours on skype with my favorite person in the world. Three weeks was far far too long to go without seeing his face :) 

SUCH a quality day.

The end.

They've sprouted!

I woke up this morning, all prepared for a trip to the grocery store and a potential visit from a wonderful friend from high school and I was surprised to find my dysfunctional little pots of seeds had begun to grow! Not surprised the zinnias sprouted first, they'll grow anywhere. Now I'm faced with the problem of finding them a bigger pot sooner than I thought I would have to...




The basil is starting to poke out too!

I'm so proud of myself. I'm such a good mother. But seriously though, there is something so satisfying about watching something that you helped give life to grow, even if it is growing just in a tiny plastic pot from Target. New life is new life, right?





For lunch today Laura and I utilized our impulse-buying skills to raid the almost-expired-and-thus-dirt-cheap-bread bin at Wal-Mart (don't judge) and made some super delicious naan-zza out of some odds and ends from the fridge. After making a really bad joke that had something to do with goat cheese, I apologized, saying "Sorry, I tend to go in for cheesy humor". Yeahhhhh bad puns.

Here's our turkey-tomato-red pepper-cheddar-chevre-garlic naan-zza, all ready to go in the oven!

It was some of the best impromptu deliciousness I've ever experienced. Here's hoping Wal-Mart's naan expires more often!

Deeeeeeee-lish.

That's all for today folks!

Wandering

Unfortunately, I have no photos to show today of my downtown adventure, for as soon as I actually got downtown I discovered that the card I had in my camera was not only not formatted for it, but would not allow me to format it. Me and technology. I swear.

But yes, I had a downtown adventure today. I wandered around for a while, killing an hour till my roommate, Laura, got done with work so we could adventure together, and found lots of things that made me wish I had money to spend. What else is new.

I went to Malaprops, an old Asheville standby favorite of mine, because I was getting desperate for the second book in the Hunger Games series.

Ok sidenote. Have you ever read a book so good that when you finished it, you swore you would never enjoy another book again? A book so absorbing you think in some way its real life, and either worry about it and its characters when youre not reading it (like in your sleep) or plan your stopping points around places in the book where the characters are sleeping or eating so as not to miss anything when you put it down? Well ladies and gents, if not, pick up the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Seriously, I read the first one (375 pages) in one night, it was that good. I found the next book in the series, Catching Fire, and proceeded to read roughly 100 pages of it in just under an hour. It's THAT good people, really. The trouble is, everyone around me thinks so too, so none of the local libraries have either of the next two books in the series. I'll just have to wait till next week when I go home to get my wisdom teeth out (get ready for THAT, dear readers).

So yes. Malaprops. Wonderful. Bookstore and cafe all rolled into one, and as I found out today, they dont kick you out when you shamelessly and openly sit there reading their books without paying for them. What's not to like?

After perusing around some little shops and eating ice cream from Kilwin's for lunch (highly recommend both the ice cream and the practice. I had cinnamon crumb cake. Seriously, where else can you find that as an ice cream flavor??), Laura and I headed back to the house to clean and prepare it for house-hunters that never showed. Ah well.

I then experienced my first clothing exchange. We went to one of Laura's coworkers apartment, dumped several bags of clothing on the floor, and sorted, folded, tried on, cast off, traded, and fought over (ok not really) it all. I came up for air with a couple of new dresses and a few shirts, and a new appreciation for this practice. Grab a few friends who's styles you like, tell them to bring a bunch of clothes, grab your ever-growing thrift store pile and  voila! One man's trash is another man's treasure and all that.

Today was a good, full day. I needed a day out of the house.
And I get to go home next week, huzzah! Oral surgery or no oral surgery, I'm excited.

Right Out My Front Door

Never got a call from the magazine today, meaning that they didn't have anything for me to photograph, and leaving me, once again, with a whole day to myself. I took a nice long walk this afternoon to explore the neighborhood. The temperature had dropped to a nice cool 87 degrees to accommodate my desire to be outside (as opposed to the 90's its been all week), so I put on my tennis shoes and headed out.

Mis-matched socks are the proper beginning to any adventure.

I'm living here for free, what in the world.

Pine trees totally have flowers.

I walked around for about an hour, and every time I thought about turning around and going back, I would find something else beautiful and startling and wonderful. Like this lily pond. Every time I got close to the waters' edge to take pictures, I would be startled by the jump splash crash of the local frog population. I saw at least one bullfrog the size of my fist. What a wonderful place.

And just think. All of this is right out my front door. I haven't even really ventured out of the neighborhood yet! There's a parkway entrance less than 10 seconds from the neighborhood entrance, and I'm just waiting till my first paycheck (aka money to waste on gas), so I can go spend an afternoon up there exploring.

I'm living in the most beautiful place on earth this summer, and I am blessed I am so blessed I am so very blessed.