Way Down Upon The Swan*na*noa ………

Oops, I guess that tune in my head was "Way Down Upon The Swanee River". Sorry for the confusion. :-) . So, where is the Swannanoa River? It is in one of our favorite places -- Asheville, North Carolina. We spent 6 days there as we were moving on our way toward Florida. This was our 4th time visiting Asheville in the past 5 years. So clearly we like it. And it is a convenient stop to and from Florida and the Midwest so we are likely to visit there again. And what about the Swannanoa? Well, we were backed up to the bank of the river at the RV Park where we stayed.

We didn't see the need to visit the Biltmore again. If you want our take on the Biltmore along with pictures, then you can check out the following link from when we blogged about it in April 2012:

http://boonedocksllc.blogspot.com/2012/04/biltmore.html

We took a couple drives on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The parkway runs from the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in the south to the Shenandoah National Park 469 miles to the north. It was a public works project of the Franklin Roosevelt administration. It was a beautiful drive even if we only drove small parts of it. We were a bit early for peak Autumn color, but from what we have heard, we likely would not have secured a camp space if it had been.

And of course we took in some breweries. Asheville has the greatest concentration of breweries anywhere east of the Mississippi. Our guess is that the culture of moon shinning fits very well with brewing beer. Asheville's brewing culture has allowed it to land some of the best craft breweries of the west as they grew to need an eastern brewery to serve nationwide demand. Sierra Nevada and Oskar Blues already had added their second breweries in the Asheville area but the latest to do so -- New Belgium (probably best known of the beer brand Fat Tire) -- recently opened its second brewery right on the banks of a river in Asheville. No, not the Swannanoa, the brewery is on the banks of the much larger French Broad River.