Started the day with a stop at the North Carolina Arboretum. Donna wanted to go to see the gardens. Diane and Allen wanted to go back because the last time they visited in April nothing was in bloom. I wanted to go because it meant a top down drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The original plan was to all ride in D & A’s Integra, but Donna wasn’t feeling to well so she wanted to ride in the Miata. As a surprise bonus the Arboretum was hosting the 2002 Carolina Bonsai Expo. Very beautiful stuff. Amazing that in today’s fast paced society that this slow moving art form survives. Of course there are tons of web sites devoted to it. After that it was too early to go right to lunch so I devised a little loop that included a stop at Looking Glass Falls and Sliding Rock before ending up at the Pisgah Inn for lunch. The food is really good and the view is super making it well worth the 30 minute wait. After eating, we stayed on the Parkway and went over to the Folk Art Center. From there we went our serparate ways, Diane & Allen went into downtown Asheville and we headed back to the hotel. Later, after supper, a trip for ice cream was agreed upon. Allen looked in his Underground Asheville book and picked a place called Sweet Heaven because of the ice cream but it also has live music. When we got there “Inna Gadda Da Vida” as coming from a kid on a really nice Roland piano whose father was a baby when that song came out. Turns out this 14 year old keyboard prodigy, Nick Stubblefield, also plays for the Sunday brunch at the hoity-toity Grove Park Inn. A while later his 12 year old sister accompanied him by singing a few old jazz standards. She was as amazingly as good as he was.
Started up, went down, went up, still up.
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