The whole point of driving all the way to Asheville, North Carolina from Tampa was to see fall. I’ve never seen it and though I don’t have a bucket list if I did seeing fall and snow would be on it.

So the first morning we woke we woke up at the you-know-what of dawn (seems to be becoming a weekend ritual) and drove about 45 minutes (I think north?) to Craggy Gardens. Why get up so early when on vacation?

Because this. The top picture is of the sunrise and the clouds we are looking down on. Ya, I’ll wake up for that.

As if that wasn’t enough a baby bear ran in front of the car on the drive up.  Having never seen one I babbled like a 2 year old about it until my partner in crime was probably ready to slip me a Valium, but hey, it was cool. And he pretended like I wasn’t crazy annoying, so all good. 🙂

Once the sun was up we started hiking. Turns out hiking in the mountains for 8 hours after living in totally flat Florida for 8 years was a wee bit tiring.  But totally worth walking being a chore for like 3 days.

I had forgot how much I loved wandering about in the mountains, sloshing up streams and generally spending entire days just exploring outside. The entire day we saw one couple after we had turned back to the car, no one else was on the trail at all. Perfection.

What was missing?  Well, I had kind of expected more color.  There was lots of yellow and gold, but very little reds except for one tiny little tree. The best place of all was about 500 feet of the trail where the leaves on the ground looked like rose petals (in spite of no red in the trees above) which seemed like at any moment a fairy could fly by and you wouldn’t even be surprised.

Now I am not and was not complaining about the lack of red color in the trees, because truly the place was beautiful.  But wait until you see what we found on the drive out.

Classic fall. Can’t wait to show you.