Moon Blue Ridge & Smoky Mountains

Well, this weekend I finished editing page proofs for Moon Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, which is scheduled to hit bookstores in May.  Take a sneak peek and pre-order the book now, just in time for the Blue Ridge Parkway’s 75th Anniversary.  Check out the pre-order options at Avalon Travel.

If you’ve been under blizzard duress these past few weeks and wondering if spring will ever come, you can at least daydream about it.  Start planning a spring getaway to the Brandywine River Valley west of Philadelphia.  Trust me, in only a couple of months you can be enjoying blossoms like these at Longwood Gardens.  Check out my latest travel feature “Brandywine in Bloom” in the March issue of Baltimore Magazine, which just hit newsstands.

Humpback Whale and calf in Icy Strait

The thing about Alaska is you must keep your eyes open.  If you don’t, you’ll likely miss something–that sudden flash of spray as a humpback whale rises out of the sea, the darting head of a sea otter investigating you from afar.  The Safari Explorer that Sarah and I boarded last September for a week-long tour of the Inside Passage with 20 other passengers and a crew of about just as many promises one thing at least–Alaska without relent.

Scanning Icy Strait for whales

Our first morning, breakfast was left cooling on the table as Captain Scott Carden announced humpback whales in full sight just off the northern coast of Admiralty Island.  And the thing you have to remember about Alaska is there won’t just be one whale…or even half a dozen.  There may be 20 or even 30.  They will be ubiquitous, outnumbering any human presence within 60 miles perhaps.  The thought that once the whole earth was like this–dominated by wild creatures–gives one a little thrill.  As does the sound.  As a female rises to the surface in company with her calf, her blowhole percolates upward releasing a sound like the calculated whoosh of a hot air balloon passing overhead.  Then another one rises several yards away, releasing the carol of a foghorn that echoes off the mountainsides, carrying away on the brisk air for miles.  It seems the humpbacks surround us for hours, as we wind around into Icy Strait and the distant Fairweather Mountain range comes into view.

Fairweather Range from Icy Strait

In the afternoon, we head out in kayaks to explore the little inlets around George Island.  The silence is overpowering.  There is nothing here at all, and as Sarah and I paddle around the edge of the island out of sight of the yacht, we leave all sight of humanity behind.  The lap-lap of the water against the kayak, the stiff trunks of wind-battered evergreens, the swish of sea kelp in the water is all there is to life here.  And then suddenly, the surface of the water breaks a few yards ahead of us, and the slick head of a sea otter appears, whiskers dripping beads of the tranquil bay.  We approach.  He darts under the surface, rises again a little further on, teasing us to follow, curious and elusive all at once.   We stop paddling and listen to the perfect silence, taking in the vastness of a world where we are entirely and beautifully irrelevant.

Kayaking around George Island

Kayaking near Cross Sound

There are certain disadvantages to being stranded on the farm in winter, but the views are not one of them….  Here’s to winter in the Blue Grass Valley.

Do you know anyone who owns AGCO or Massey Ferguson equipment who has an interesting story to tell?  It doesn’t need to be tractor or hay baler related!  A farmer who does rodeo on the side or a farmer who has built an ice rink in his cornfield….something along those lines.  He or she must be willing to do an interview for a magazine.  Thank you!

Palmer Chapel

Next time you’re visiting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and eager for a peek at the mountains’ human history, skip the traffic jams in popular Cades Cove, and head to the North Carolina side of the park.  The serene and lovely Cataloochee Valley, accessible via a winding gravel road just off I-40 west of Asheville and north of Maggie Valley, provides a haunting look at the park’s human past in what was once the Smokies’ largest settled community.

Front porch of the Caldwell House

The only thing roaming the woods, meadows, and trout steams of Cataloochee these days are elk…and a few wayward visitors looking to avoid the crowds of east Tennessee….

A long abandoned Bible in Palmer Chapel

For more detailed information on the history of the Cataloochee Valley, pre-order my new book Moon Smoky Mountains and Blue Ridge online.

The front door at Woody Place

Next time your angry boss or spouse tells you to “Go to Hell,” you really can…that is if you can book a flight to Grand Cayman in the western Caribbean.  It’s the only place I know of (at least literally speaking) where you can find Hell on Earth.  Don’t forget to send Mom a postcard….

Coming in from a kayak trip around John Hopkins Inlet (Courtesy Marylyn Williams)

If you’ve never traveled to Alaska previously,  and you’re overwhelmed by the vastness of this most beautiful of our 50 states, even though you’ve been dying to go there, there are some good ways to get your feet wet (no pun intended).  When Sarah and I took our latest girls’ getaway last summer, we booked a week-long small yacht tour of the Inside Passage through American Safari Cruises, which places you on a small luxury yacht with 12 to 36 other passengers and plies the small bays inaccessible to the increasingly large number of cruise ships that come sailing into Alaska’s southeast archipelago.  Not only will you enjoy comfortable (if small) accommodations aboard these small ships, you’ll also experience unparalleled access to the Alaska wilds (including unescorted kayaking excursions, explorations by skiff, and hiking adventures) while still being able to spend your evenings in something much finer than a tent.  I’m talking pretty well-done gourmet meals, an open bar, and daily opportunities for massage, yoga, and hot tub immersion.  Yes, it’s pricey.  But if your goal is to get an overview of southeast Alaska without sharing the experience with a thousand of your closest friends on a mega cruise ship and never setting your foot on land, it’s well worth the expense.

I’ll admit it.  I’ve never been a fan of flying, not even before 9/11.  But I do remember the days when flying wasn’t so…well…painful.  Those good old days when it was actually faster to fly from Washington, D.C. to Atlanta than to drive there.  Remember those days?

Now unless you’re flying across the ocean or across the country, flying just doesn’t make economic sense anymore.  Apart from the ridiculous prices you’ll pay for an airline ticket these days (and mind you, that’s a ticket that does not include the cost of checked baggage, though it does include a bag of exactly six tiny pretzels and a complimentary beverage–mostly ice in a little plastic cup), by the time you factor in the time driving to the airport, then finding a parking space, then riding some shuttle all over half the countryside to reach your terminal, then standing in a TSA line for an hour or more, finally getting on your flight only to find it delayed an hour (an hour you spend in a cramped seat on the tarmac), then flying to your destination, where you spend another hour or two trying to track down your luggage and an over-priced rental car….well, yep, you could have driven there faster.

The true headache of flying was made manifest to me over the holidays when I and my family were scheduled to fly out of D.C. to Minneapolis.  Yes, as it so happened, our flight was scheduled the day after a blizzard, which meant a seven-hour drive on snow-packed roads to the airport, only to find out 30 minutes after our arrival that our flight was cancelled.  Did I mention we were scheduled to fly on AirTran?  (That was the first mistake–there is a reason AirTran’s rates are lower.)

Well, initially I wasn’t worried, despite the mile-long line in front of AirTran’s customer service desk at Reagan International.  I had my cell phone, and AirTran’s customer service number.  I could get this mess straightened out and have us on another flight in no time!  How wrong I was.  AirTran, true to their lousy reputation, dropped all calls that day, forcing its thousands of unhappy, stranded customers to wait in long lines at the airport, many of them with exhausted two-year-olds just like ours.

THREE hours later we found ourselves at the customer service desk, after watching many folks ahead of us get turned away with no alternative flights, flights leaving on Christmas Day, and various other unhappy outcomes.  And here comes my first big piece of advice: If you find yourself in this situation, KNOW YOUR AIRLINE.  Know what cities they fly out of, and keep your options open.  If you go up to the desk after your flight is cancelled expecting you’ll get on another flight to your destination that very same day, especially in the wake of weather-related cancellations, you’re smoking more than cigarettes.  It took 45 minutes of negotiations with the lady at the AirTran desk, but we finally found a flight to Minneapolis that would put us there before Christmas.  But we had to be willing to drive three hours to another airport in Newport News to get on it, then be willing to spend the night in Atlanta before proceeding on to our final destination.

We took it.

And….40 hours after we intially started our journey to the airport, we were safely on the doorstep of my grandmother’s house in southwest Minnesota.  40 HOURS.  Did I mention it takes a little over 20 hours to DRIVE from our doorstep to my grandmother’s?   Exactly what did we gain by flying?  Certainly not any extra time with family.  Certainly no savings for our pocketbook given we had to pay full price for our two-year-old to fly even though she spent the whole flight in my husband’s lap.

Most businesses that offer this level of terrible service (and did I mention the cramped seats that make the airplane water closets seem spacious?) would eventually drive themselves under.  How do the airlines manage to stay afloat?

You got me.  But I’d be glad to hear any explanations you might come up with.

This is one increasingly less frequent flyer who is desperate enough to consider Amtrak an option in the future….

How's the hay on your side of the roof?

And chickens, too.  I wonder how many wrecks occur along Highway 441 south of Clayton, Georgia, with folks trying to figure out just what is going on here.  I know I had to make a U-turn, go back, and take another look.  Whoever came up with this idea for getting tourists to pile into their country store was no ninny.