What a wonderful day we’ve had.
Collected by friends at 7.00am to head to the mountains.
Our first stop was at Lake Junaluska.
There is a lake here unsurprisingly but it is also the base for the United Methodist Church’s North Carolina conference and home to the offices of the World Methodist Council and the World Methodist Museum. So for me it was a very interesting place with lots of Methodist artefacts. For Anne it was fairly interesting and for Tom it was boring!
The museum contained some interesting paintings and artefacts including John Wesley's death mask.
One thing that surprised me was seeing a British Methodist Overseas Mission collecting box circa 1960 (for British Methodist friends the little globe one) in a case. My mum and dad still have one!
But Lake Junaluska must be a wonderful place for a conference or a retreat. Any chance of the ministerial synod coming here I wonder?
After this it was time for lunch and our friends took us to a small town called Maggie Valley and we went to a small diner. What a lovely little local place. And I managed to avoid barbecue! Woo hoo! Instead I had locally caught trout.
Over lunch our friends offered us a choice of where to go next. We could either go to nearby Ashville or to a museum in Maggie Valley called Wheels Through Time. I know where I wanted to go but this being the first few days of Anne’s holiday I buttoned my lip. But she said “David and I will be going to Ashville on the weekend when we visit the Biltmore, so let’s go the motor museum.” (That’s why I love her.)
It is a museum mainly of American motorcycles, though there are some American cars. Some of the bikes are 100 years old but most work as the owner gets them into working order.
I am more a car fan but this was a great place. And our friend told us how as a young man he had had an Indian motorbike very much like one of those in the museum. To see the face of an older man light up as he retold the story was a joy.
http://www.wheelsthroughtime.com
After our visit finished our friends took us on a drive up in to the mountains proper. There is some debate about whether the mountains at this point were the Smokey Mountains or the Blue Ridge Mountains. Whichever they were at this point, they are very very beautiful.
We drove for mile after mile along meandering roads through small hamlets and villages and eventually along twisting tree lined roads all the time climbing. After reaching the junction with the Blue Ridge Parkway we started to slowly drop down. The roads are so tree lined it is not possible to see any distance but occasionally there would be a small break and we’d catch glimpses of the magnificent views.
Our friends pulled into an area called Sliding Rock, run by the National Forest Service. This is a waterfall but the waterfall travels over a very smooth rock surface creating a very large water slide. Under supervision of the park rangers and life guards people slide down the rock slide into a pool at the bottom. It looked amazing fun. But given the back board at the lifeguard station, (for use with someone with a suspected back or neck injury) sliding here is not without danger.
Eventually we arrived back home around 8pm after a wonderful day with (as usual) generous friends.
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