Oceans, Mountains, and Music

We said farewell to the beach and our friends of Morehead City on Monday after easter, heading to Asheville, NC, famed hippie town of the mountains. Fun place -we played downtown and had dinner with Tracy, my friend from JMU who is so freakin’ smart she has her PhD and is a professor at UNC-Asheville at the tender age of 29. We also got to hang with Mark Capon, another friend from JMU and co-captain of Harvest Records, a stellar record shop in west a-ville, and we slept in the narrow confines of other record captain Matt Schnottball’s twin bed, who was busy being in Mexico that day. Matty, sorry we missed your pretty face. Thanks for the bed. Come see us in Bolivia.

From there we ventured on to Great Smoky Mountain National Park, crossing from NC into TN. Neither of us had been to this most visited park of the US, and it was a worthy detour. There are small “Quiet Walking Area” trails that beat the pants off the over-treaded trails near the large parking lots full of SUVs. We also passed some sweet swimming holes we would have tested if the weather were a touch warmer.

We landed in Nashville on Tuesday afternoon, just in time to see my rockstar friend Stephanie Chapman in concert at a bar called 12th and Porter. The show was dy-no-mite. Steph and I met our first year of college, and I remember one night when we were hanging out in a friend’s dorm room, he was playing his guitar, and Steph was all, “gee, I want to learn to play the guitar.” Now she’s a freakin’ country music star. What a babe.


Steph and her husband Nathan rockin' the house at 12th and Porter in Nashville.