New Age in the Blue Ridge

Last weekend we celebrated Mike's birthday with a trip to Asheville, NC's new age capital. We spent most of the time at the Grove Park Inn and its spa, and really only saw Asheville proper for a few hours, though. The Grove Park is named for an elixir maker and travelling salesman, Mr. Grove, who was one of those old frontier medicine men selling concoctions for "grip" and "catarrh", and in other reading it seems these syrups were also a way for people to drink alcohol and evade the dry laws... Grove struck a gold mine when he opened the Inn as a sanatorium for people with tuberculosis. It spawned a real industry for Asheville as a health destination, where Northeastern gentry would come to summer. The Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers all had their chateaux built here, and it's the setting for The Great Gatsby, which Fitzgerald wrote while staying at the Grove Park. Anyway, they've redone the grand old Lodge into a huge modern facility that doesn't betray its clinical past. We managed to do very little, mostly we indulged in a couple of spa "treatments" and then lounged in the mineral pools there. We did get out and eat some Thai food (still nothing close to good old Nakorn, sigh, but it'll tide us over) and before leaving, we walked around downtown and ate at the Mellow Mushroom, whose decor and music took Mike right back to some heady days. UNC Asheville is very much the Humboldt State of North Carolina, and Asheville its Arcata. In other words, it felt very much like home.