asheville babymoon, p1.

let's start this out by admitting something: I am obsessed with food. local food, precisely. and also fruit and icecream. usually not icecream--but since being pregnant? yeppers. icecream. no pickle-obsession though. well, not more than I had to begin with.

but ANYWAY.

we left on the 4th of July figuring a) less traffic, b) it meant we could get in a "long weekend" and still come back in time to have a day at home before I had to get back to work. We had a leisurely AM, loaded up the car and got on the road.

stop one: sonic. for pete's sake WHY are all of the sonics 40+ minutes from my house? Please, Sonic, America's Drive-in, come to Durham. Thank you. And mmmmmm sonic blast. I've had quite a few of these on our travels recently :)

stop two: H0bby L0bby! My love of the hob-lob is well-documented. While I am SO glad that there's now one about 50 minutes-ish away (because before the closest ones were an hour and twenty minutes away, and then before that two and a half hours away) it's still far. I really wish Hobby Lobby would come to Durham too. If it did, along with Sonic, and since Blue Bell now exists in my part of NC, well....my life would be complete. Um, ish....

and then there was napping. lots of napping. (just for me--Matt was driving!) except Matt had strict instructions to wake me as soon as there were mountain views--and it was GORGEOUS! I love the blue ridge parkway. If you ever get to drive in that part of the state I highly recommend it!

We arrived to town, checked into our holiday inn (not super fancy BUT it meant we didn't spend lots of cash and had a jacuzzi tub in our room, so I got into that EVERY night and it felt fantastic!) and headed to Tupel0 H0ney Cafe, the South location. The food there was yummy (I took iphone pics, they are nothing special and not worth the hassle of uploading here) and we got to sit on their covered patio because it had cooled down a little. Sitting outside in pleasant weather, especially for a meal, makes me think of Italy EVERY time. :)

After that, we found fireworks! We could hear them starting at dinner--and Lake Julian was just 10 minutes or less away. We parked in a grocery store parking lot, watched for a while, went in to get fruit for me and beer for Matt, and went back out to see some more. I didn't need to see the whole show, but I DID need to see some real actual fireworks. Mission accomplished. After about 10 more minutes we got in our car to head back to the hotel--and got out just before traffic, it was wonderful! (we could see the mess starting as we were turning onto another road!)

On our way back was when we saw car-on-fire #2! It was actually a relief to see police and fire trucks on their way within 45 seconds of passing by the car. But it was bizarre to see plastic literally dripping off of the back of the vehicle--their rear hatch was open and even though all we did was drive by it, it was crazy.

Then it was time for a bath for me and some HGTV-watching for Matt. We also watched a movie and stayed up very very late since we knew we could sleep in. Ahhhhh relaxing. :)