So much to do on this visit to the States. After two weeks of somewhat frenetic activity, including cross-country visits to friends and relatives, doctor’s appointments, a class for Jim, and marathon shopping for me, we spent five gloriously relaxing days in the cool mountains of North Carolina. With not a single obligation, no schedule, and only spotty internet service, we were able to enjoy some much-needed down time.
If you ever need a place to get away from it all—traffic, phone calls, summer heat and humidity, kitchen duty, whatever—I highly recommend the Cataloochee Ranch in Maggie Valley, NC. For 75 years, the Alexander family has welcomed guests to the ranch and treated them like family—at least one member of the family sits down with guests as the host at every meal. We rented one of the ranch’s twelve cabins, The Pond House, named for its proximity to the trout pond (whose residents were intentionally well-fed to dampen their enthusiasm for baited fishhooks), and only a short walk from the main ranch house and its home-cooked meals.
Our days started with a huge country breakfast of eggs, meat, oatmeal, biscuits and fruit. Then we headed out on whatever adventure we had chosen for the day—hiking, horseback riding, a ride on the Great Smokey Mountains Railroad, a trip down the mountain into town (don’t waste your time or money visiting “Ghost Town in the Sky”—its days as a B-grade Wild West-themed amusement park are numbered). Then back to the ranch for an afternoon nap before a just-like-Grandma-used-to-make dinner. After dinner, there was usually a campfire where we could enjoy the cool evening air and chat with other guests, some of whom had been coming to the ranch every summer for thirty years or more.
I dread this morning’s final mountain descent, and the ensuing return to the real world, where the humidity is high, the temperatures are higher, the dentist awaits, a 14-hour flight back to Japan looms on the calendar, and there are no good smells coming from the kitchen.
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