There are normal road trips.
And then there are Western North Carolina road trips.
Normal road trips might involve a scenic overlook, a nice restaurant, maybe an antique store.
Around here, you can spend the morning retracing Forrest Gump’s cross-country run, the afternoon looking for Bigfoot, and the evening drinking coffee inside a bookstore containing roughly 30,000 books.
And nobody in the mountains finds this particularly unusual.
I recently came across a wonderfully entertaining article from The Appalachian called “Bigfoot, Cinema, Flowers and Bookstores: Four road trip plans to explore WNC.”
And frankly, the title alone deserves some appreciation.
Where else can Bigfoot, rhododendrons, Hannibal Lecter and independent bookstores coexist so comfortably?
Welcome to Western North Carolina.
Hollywood apparently spent a surprising amount of time wandering around our mountains.
In Blowing Rock, Flat Top Manor at Moses H. Cone Memorial Park appeared in The Green Mile.
Head over to Grandfather Mountain and you’ll find the famous curve where Forrest Gump ran through the mountains during his epic cross-country journey.
There is even a sign informing visitors that Forrest ran there.
Which is useful, because otherwise you might simply assume it was another beautiful mountain curve.
Then there’s Biltmore Estate.
Parts of Forrest Gump and The Last of the Mohicans were filmed there, but things took a considerably darker turn when Biltmore became the home of Mason Verger in the 2001 film Hannibal.
So you can tour America’s largest private residence, admire the architecture, enjoy the gardens...
...and quietly remember that Hannibal Lecter once wandered through the movie version of the place.
Keep heading south and you reach DuPont State Recreational Forest, where waterfalls and forests became part of the world of The Hunger Games.
Apparently Western North Carolina can play just about anything.
Georgia.
A dystopian battlefield.
The American frontier.
And itself.
Maybe fictional serial killers and dystopian teenagers aren’t your idea of a relaxing vacation.
Fair enough.
Western North Carolina also offers something considerably more peaceful.
Flowers.
The article suggests a route through some of the region’s most beautiful places, including Roan Mountain, where rhododendrons can cover portions of the high country in pink during June.
Then there’s Hawksbill Mountain above Linville Gorge, Catawba Falls near Old Fort and the North Carolina Arboretum near Asheville.
No monsters.
No movie villains.
Just mountains, waterfalls and flowers.
Although this is Appalachia, so I wouldn’t completely rule out monsters.
Which brings us to...
Yes.
There is an entire Bigfoot road trip.
And I fully support this.
The journey begins in the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area, nearly 12,000 acres of rugged country where, theoretically, a giant undiscovered primate could be conducting his affairs without paying property taxes.
From there, you can head toward Marion and the WNC Bigfoot Festival, scheduled this year for August 29.
There are vendors.
Music.
Food.
Educational panels.
And presumably several people willing to explain precisely why that blurry photograph they took in 2017 cannot possibly be a bear.
Then the hunt moves into the Black Mountains, home to some of the highest peaks in the eastern United States.
And if, after all of this effort, Sasquatch continues refusing to make an appointment, there’s good news.
Near the entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park stands a 10-foot-tall Bigfoot statue.
At last.
Photographic evidence.
Case closed.
This may actually be my favorite road trip of the four.
Western North Carolina has always had a wonderful relationship with books.
Stories belong here.
In Boone you’ll find Huzzah Books, a shop mixing literature with art, music and community events.
Travel south to Little Switzerland and you’ll discover Little Switzerland Books & Beans, a place that has been around since 1986 and contains approximately 30,000 new and used books spread across three floors.
There is also an espresso bar.
This creates a potentially dangerous situation for book lovers.
Coffee + 30,000 books + mountain views =
“I’ll just stay another twenty minutes.”
Three hours later...
In Morganton, Thornwell Books even offers something called a “blind date with a book.”
The book is wrapped.
You can’t see the title.
You receive only clues about the genre and story.
Which is still considerably less risky than most actual blind dates.
Then there is Asheville’s beloved Malaprop’s, Mr. K’s, and farther west, City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, which has long celebrated Appalachian writers and regional literature.
You could look at these four road trips and see four unrelated ideas.
Movies.
Wildflowers.
Bigfoot.
Books.
But somehow they all belong together here.
Because Western North Carolina has always been a place where the real and imaginary live surprisingly close to one another.
There are genuine mountain histories beside old legends.
Hollywood stories beside family stories.
Waterfalls beside bookstores.
Civil War history beside Bigfoot festivals.
And somewhere along a winding two-lane road, there’s probably a little restaurant serving biscuits that deserves its own documentary.
That mixture is part of what makes these mountains endlessly interesting.
You never quite know what you’ll find around the next curve.
A waterfall?
A movie location?
An old bookstore?
A spectacular view?
Bigfoot?
Probably not Bigfoot.
But I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
The inspiration for this post comes from The Appalachian’s excellent feature:
“Bigfoot, Cinema, Flowers and Bookstores: Four road trip plans to explore WNC.”
If you’re planning a weekend wandering around Western North Carolina, it’s worth a read.
And if you actually see Bigfoot...
Please get a better photograph this time.
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