North Carolina

Sunday, November 22
A nice, lazy morning in NC with Peg and Paul. Keturah found an espresso machine and tried her professional hand at reviving it after years of unuse. It did her soul good to have her hands on a steamer! Uncle Paul dug up a bunch of great books for us and we chatted and drank coffee for a few hours before shooting down to Fort Mills, SC for church at Morning Star (Rick Joyner!! Except he wasn't there..). Kendra will be writing more on this later but it was, in one word, refreshing. After church we followed Conscience (our GPS) all over Charlotte looking for a coffee shop with Wi-Fi and ended up at that Faithful Chain: Panera Bread. An hour or so later Madame Kiki Neale and her mother met us! Kiki was Kendra's French teacher in middle school. It was as though no time had passed.. she was just as funny and stimulating as ever and sent us on our way with a miniature bottle of Lysol to scare away all the bad guys.


Monday, November 23
A lazy morning with the house to ourselves. Kendra made more bread at 7am, probably waking the whole neighborhood with the rattly bread machine. Explored the area with individual jogs and found a whole lot of dead ends. Did some laundry and decided to head a bit West to Asheville, a city apparently full of people like us. Now this we had to see! We had our first Spanish CD lesson on the road.. "Es un coche!"

About 10 miles from Asheville we saw a sign for Black Mountain claiming to have "Visitor Information". Deciding we qualified for such a place, we took the exit and found ourselves in a little room full of brochures with a stout, white-haired man named Bob. Bob spoke slowwwlyy and carefullyyy and told us allll abouttt the places we should most definitely see on our journey. Keturah ate it up while I, Kendra, sat rather fidgety trying to take notes on everything he was saying as I tried not to notice the slow but sure progression from light to dark outside the window. By the time we departed we had about 30 minutes of daylight remaining. And thus begins an adventure *dundundun*