carolina in my mind

Last week we drove down to Banner Elk, North Carolina (the ski capitol of the South!) to join our friends Christian and Carla at their family's cabin for a few days. I totally get why there are lots of songs written about the South because darn it, it's so beautiful! While we were walking around the property and driving through the small towns scattered throughout the area, I kept on imagining Ada and Inman in my very favorite book Cold Mountain, and I just found out that the real Cold Mountain is in Linville, which is just a few miles down the road from Banner Elk, which is kind of awesome. Anyway, this was my first time further south than Richmond, so that was kind of exciting. I brought that up a couple of times and Christian's family members would look kind of incredulous and then say, "well, how far west have you been?" and I told them I grew up out west and then they didn't tease me as much after that. One thing that still gets me about living out here is that the states are all really close together so it is really easy to hit up lots of states in one trip. One minute we were in Virginia, then Tennessee, then all of a sudden we found ourselves in North Carolina, so I got to check some more states off of my list.

We really didn't have an agenda for our trip other than to relax, enjoy the mountains, play board games until the late hours of the night, and hold Christian and Carla's baby Leila. Robbie is doing well at practicing his baby-holding and baby girls seem to really favor him. It was pretty much a dream. 

I have lots more pictures to share later, but I figured everyone could use another pretty dose of nature pictures, right?