Above: Green Man Brewing's Demon Dweller, and the road out of Asheville.
One of our weekend-in-Asheville goals was to hike a handful of especially fun-looking trails along the Blue Ridge Parkway. But as Micah explains here, it didn't work out. No matter; we're already planning another trip in a few months (it's hard to leave Asheville without planning the next trip to Asheville). And one of the things I love about the area is that you don't have to take this long parkway drive to really see the mountains, because they literally surround the city. There were countless times we were navigating ourselves around town, only to take a quick turn, or come to the top of a hill, and be completely taken aback by the view. It never got old, and was just a great, constant visual reminder that we were somewhere Different and Special.
I also can't think of Asheville without thinking about beer. Delicious, weird, sometimes wild craft beers. This time we visited the new and impressively tenacious Wicked Weed taproom – I tried the French Toast Stout, and Micah had the Freak of Nature IPA. We will definitely return there on any future Asheville trips. They happened to be releasing their first bottled beer the weekend we were there, and we were blown away by seeing a hundreds-long line of people waiting hours to simply purchase bottles. I'll love any city that obsessively supports their breweries like that.
We also chilled out at Green Man Brewing, and Asheville Brewing Company. Last time, we hit up Wedge Brewery and Highland Brewing Company... and I can't wait to see where we'll end up next time.