Greetings From Maggie Valley, North Carolina

I'm writing this on Thursday, October 16th while sitting in the Blue Ridge Books & News in Waynesville, NC and using their free Wi-Fi. Waynesville is about halfway between Moonshine Creek Campground in Sylva (really Balsam, though) where we are camping in the Taj Mahal of Tents and our property in Maggie Valley, and is one of our favorite towns to visit.

We arrived Sunday afternoon around 4:30 after an 11-hour drive. It took us about an hour to get our new Taj Mahal of Tents (pictures later) pitched and camping gear unpacked and after a dinner of smoked chicken sandwiches we hit the sack.

Monday we had lunch with our realtor, Kelley Starnes (I highly recommended her if you need an excellent realtor in western North Carolina) and our building contractor Dennis Cook. We went over the building plans of our cabin, then later in the afternoon we met Dennis at the property to go over some placement details. That was a good thing as it turned out we needed to turn the cabin 90 degrees for optimum placement. Now our front porch faces the creek to the west, but we can still see some of the mountains to the south from the front porch and what will be my office.

Tuesday we decided (ok, Cindy decided) to have a picnic lunch on the property. That was a good idea. Then she suggested we drive down the access road to our property instead of walking. That was a bad idea. I realized it was a bad idea about 20 feet down the road when it occurred to me that our 2-wheel drive Frontier was NOT going to get us back up the steep incline. I stopped and tried to back out, but it was no-go. In the end I burned up half a tire's worth of rubber on both back tires, blew out one of the back tires and was almost run over by my wife trying to get the truck out. We finally had to call AAA to have a tow truck come winch us out and up the road. By the way, for everyone's future reference, AAA only covers state-maintained or blacktop roads, so we had to pay out of pocket for the service. By the time we got done with that and could drive back to the campsite, it was 6pm and all the tire stores were closed.



Wednesday we called to get two new back tires for the truck, but of course no one in town had the size we needed and we had to wait for them to arrive from Asheville on Thursday, so we didn't do much driving on the "donut" spare. But we did do a little on Wednesday and I'll catch up with that later.

Thanks for reading.

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