Trip to Asheville

In order to celebrate Natalie's birthday, we road-tripped to Asheville, NC, site of the filming of "The Hunger Games."  We'd heard so many great things that we decided to go while Taylor was still able to get away.  It was a 4 hour drive, but we were just grateful to have time together after an extremely stressful week for Taylor.  Let's just say that staying up until 2am doing school work and getting up at 6am for five nights in a row is not fun!

Anyway, Asheville was a great town - it reminded me a bit of an East Coast Tucson, and the downtown was eerily like Ithaca, NY.  We started off our day by going to Grandad's Orchard in Hendersonville, and we picked up some yummy apples and pumpkins.  It was such a beautiful day.  

 Feeding the llama

That evening we went to downtown Asheville, but we didn't take any pictures.  We also didn't last very long - most of the restaurants had looong waits, and since it was already 6pm (bed time is at 7!), we didn't want to push Miss Natalie.  Early to bed we went!

The next morning we went to the North Carolina Arboretum, which was absolutely beautiful.  We had been hoping to catch some fall colors, which were just barely starting to come out.

We thought this structure was really cool.

We went on a little hike through the woods.

Nat has this great book called an "Indestructible," which feels like regular paper but is tear-proof and baby-drool-proof.  Since she is currently chomping off bits of her board books, this book comes in handy!

We spent in to the early afternoon here, and then we headed back to Raleigh to meet my parents!