asheville, NC

fall break.

it's a novel concept that byu apparently has no idea about. tommy and i celebrated our first mid-semester break EVER by going to asheville, about four hours west of durham, in the blue ridge mountains. maybe we were feeling a bit homesick for the mountains of utah. maybe we just really wanted to see that fabulous appalachian fall foliage we kept hearing about. maybe we were trying to escape our sunbeams on sunday (okay, NO). maybe we just wanted to escape school.

whatever our motivation, it was an awesome, awesome trip. ever since our cross-country road trip, we've thought a lot about road trips and where we can go. asheville was originally our second choice (to charleston and savannah), but i'm so glad we went there. we continued our road trip tradition of listening to long series of books on tape and borrowed all seven of the chronicles of narnia from the durham library and listened to four of them. (tommy had never read them. can you believe that?) it was magical, to say the least.

but anyways. this is what we did:

we camped.

(and cooked a gourmet dutch oven meal and made smores.)

we hiked.

we drove. along the blue ridge parkway. for hours.

and as we drove, we looked.

we also drove a few extra hours to go to murphy, NC (population 1,568)--because we HAD TO. and took a bunch of ridiculous pictures to commemorate it.

we visited the biltmore, the vanderbilts' little family cottage getaway.

we stayed at a cute cute bed and breakfast the eve of my birthday. (for free--thank you hotels.com)

we ate president obama's favorite asheville bbq at 12 Bones.

and we celebrated my birthday yesterday by driving home, making carly's white bean chili (love that stuff, car, seriously) and bruschetta, and working on the 1000 piece north carolina puzzle we bought as a souvenir from our trip.

good times.

p.s. thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone. i love you all.