Our next stop was the beautiful Mast Farm Inn in Valle Crucis, North Carolina. We chose to visit here as it had a great write up in the Lonely Planet Guide and was tucked away in the mountains, off the beaten track. We met some Americans holidaying here, and they were quite amazed that we had managed to travel halfway across the world and to stumble on such a cosy bolthole!
The Mast Farm (on which the inn is situated), dates from the late 1700’s when Joseph Mast travelled to the mountains and traded his rifle, dog and a pair of leggings for 1000 acres of fertile Watauga River Valley land. The first house was built on the land around 1810 and is the oldest inhabitable log cabin in North Carolina. Today you can stay in the inn, some new chalets or in some of the beautifully restored farm buildings. A delicious two course home cooked farm to table breakfast is served each morning in the inn’s dining room and local provisions and homemade cakes are served in the afternoon. The help yourself cookie jar is always full of freshly made cookies!
There were some amazing thunderstorms during the evenings while we were staying here and we felt so cozy tucked up in the inn while the storms raged outside!
We spent our time here doing some hiking in the mountains on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which stretches 469 miles from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina.
The countryside is spectacular and surprisingly for us West Aussies, very hot and humid in the forest. Back home I spoke to a Canadian who said she really misses the humidity when hiking in Australia – not me, give me dry heat anyday! Flowers which can often be found in our gardens (rhododendrons, azaleas and magnolias), grow wild, making for a particularly beautiful hike when they are blooming.
We also visited the swinging bridge and the animal habitat at Grandfather Mountain, a Unesco Biosphere Reserve. The black bear was nowhere to be seen, much to our dismay. However, if we had know what was to come in our trip, we wouldn’t have been worried!
Before we headed onto Gatlinburg the next day, we visited the Mast General Store just near the Mast Farm Inn. The store opened in 1883 and still sells much of the same products as it did back then. It’s a great place to spend an hour or two sifting through the cornucopia of merchandise and its a good location to buy some souvenirs. In the winter the local old timers gather around the potbelly inside to trade yarns of yesteryear. You can feel the history oozing out of the walls! We also made a stop at the Foggy Mountain Gem Mine to pan for semiprecious stones. This was a blast for adults and kids alike. Once we had panned out the semiprecious stones we were given a very informative talk about them. You get to keep what you find, and also have the chance to have them polished and shipped home to be made into jewellery at a later date.
After lunch at a local diner we drove onto our next adventure involving BEARS!!!