Non-laboring Labor Day 2009

We went to the mtns on Labor Day.

I normally LABOR on Labor Day - usually around the house getting a plethora of projects either started, only to remain in various states of incompletion for months on end; or complete a few that have been hanging over my head.

Not this year.

This year we played.

First, we went to Table Rock State Park, where I have spent lots of time in the distant past, but not so much in the last 16+ years. Matter of fact, Melinda commented that she & I had never been there together.

Well, we have now.












With the kids.










We hiked the Carrick's Creek Trail, which is really quite astounding for Melinda with her current back issues.






















We had ourselves a picnic lunch and then headed up through the mtns to Brevard, which holds one of the most fun little toy stores in the Southeast . . .








Two stories of sheer childhood bliss.









Etch-a-sketch fun:
























Paddle balls:























Toys from a bygone TV era:
















Army men:















Marbles:























And then there's the slot-car track:































































Of course, I appreciate the real plaster & lath as well as the hardwood floors in the old downtown shops:
































































There are just some fun details on the streets, like giant toy wooden soldiers and the gumball machine:































I even found a pristine tool set just like one my brother had as a kid - one that my kids never saw anything but bits & pieces of and they managed to lose or destroy the remainder of what was passed along. I couldn't believe the price tag on the thing!!!!!!







































We were just about tuckered out, as evidenced by my most energetic boy's exhausted stance:
























But, we still had one more errand to run.

APPLES!


















Hendersonville was a wee bit crowded, due to the Apple Festival, but we skirted that and headed to our favorite apple stand for the season's final haul of Honey Crisp's. Good thing, too, because the sky was ready to loose a storm of epic proportions on us, but we just managed to get turned onto I-26 before it caught up to us:

Surprises

I love surprises.

You know the kind - the best ones are where you could never have planned things to be just the way they were, yet things work out wonderfully better than you ever thought they might.


Mt. Mitchell is the highest peak East of the Mississippi River.



This is what it looked like Saturday, September 15, 2007 around 11 o'clock in the morning.








We found these growing all over the place:



Now raspberries are a favorite fruit in our family but very rare down South, especially in September. So to find them growing all around the picnic area at the summit was a suitable replacement for the view we so hoped to find.




We hung around for a couple of hours and enjoyed the fog at the picnic shelters, picking raspberries, taking pictures of birds & berry bushes and kids frolicking around in the fog.

Then we headed down toward Craggy Gardens and on to other planned and unplanned parts of the day.

The surprises continued at Craggy when we discovered that there were still some late-season Huckleberries along the path to the trail shelter & lookout.

We saw a couple of butterflies - a Cloudless Sulphur and a Pintail Swallowtail, but alas no Monarchs. The rain from Tropical Storm Humberto as well as us being about 30 miles North of their migration route seemed to have derailed those efforts this trip.

But the fog was splendid.