Spring Visitors

My friend Steve flew in from Washington, D.C., last weekend (via Detroit -- no joke) and thus earned the title of our first Spring visitor. (And possibly last, after this story.)

I prepared for the trip by sending him links to information about absolutely every fabulous place I could think to take him.

There weren't many, so I was slightly puzzled when he emailed me back with a comment about how busy we'd be. I was certain that my pull-out-all-the-stops Asheville-and-vicinity itinerary would yield just enough entertainment to fill his 72 hours here and send him home with fond memories of Asheville but no need to return because, to be honest, there wouldn't be anything left to do. (Not that we don't want you return, Steve, if you're reading this.)

We started out, I thought, almost promisingly. He seemed to enjoy the half mile walk to The Boy's school ("I guess yours is the one running toward you," he observed when we arrived, no great kid person that he is), despite the hills. But almost as soon as we returned home I discovered I had sent Hubby off to work with the car seat car. Yes, loathe to capitulate entirely to frumpy parenthood, we own only one car that can accommodate The Boy's car seat. It is, unfortunately, also the only car we own that can accommodate the lawnmower Hubby took to get serviced that day. Which meant that Steve had to go pick up the pizza I ordered for the sitter on his own.

I know it's a little bit unusual to send your guest who's been in town all of two hours out by himself to pick up pizza, but all concerned agreed that option was far preferable to him staying home with The Boy. Besides, it's a pretty small town, and I felt confident he'd make it back.

Once the pizza and sitter were firmly in place, I was anxious to show Steve our lively downtown. He did me the favor of admiring it, both on the way for pre-dinner drinks and even more enthusiastically on our way to the restaurant, well oiled with martinis. And when we saw folks heading for the drum circle after dinner, he didn't even bat an eyelash, though I'm not certain he really knew what a drum circle is.

The real sense that we might not offer our friends a gala get-away weekend started the next morning. To his credit, Steve is not a high maintenance guest. Throw a couple of cinnamon raisin bagels from the shop around the corner at him for breakfast, and he can take care of himself. It's just that by 11:00 I imagine he was getting a little bit tired of watching us run around gathering supplies for an afternoon out with a toddler. As I may have mentioned, Steve will be the last person to label himself a lover of kids, although he did spend a good deal of his morning on the floor with the dogs. So, really, in retrospect, I think we were all okay.

To be fair, part of what was making entertainment difficult was the threat of rain. Asheville is sort of an outdoor place -- not many big museums or other indoor attractions, unless you count the Mall, which I don't.

So as soon as it started to clear, we went into action mode. Out the door, diaper bag in tow, and off to the Western Carolina Nature Center we went. This was one attraction I could wave at Steve with a feeling that we do live in a place worth the price of his plane ticket (and the time spent in the Detroit Airport). Steve is a big lover of the animals, especially wolves, and our Nature Center has them. A few were even out, looking soggy and annoyed, but willing to have their picture taken.

Then it was off for an authentic (as far as we know) lunch of Native American food, the highlights of which, I gathered, were the alligator bites and the fry bread. (Not "fried bread," Hubby scolded me. Just "fry bread.")

On my own, I would have started apologizing at this point. Steve had 48 more hours to spend in Asheville, and I couldn't think of anything rousing to do in the almost rain. We'd pretty much covered downtown last night -- its size seems charming and manageable when you plan correctly, but comes back to bite you when you take an evening walk after dinner and wipe out your plans for most of the following day.

Luckily, I now have Hubby to make up for my shortcomings as a hostess. He suggested that Steve might want to see Hendersonville, home of the camp where he was a counselor 30 years ago. (30? I'm doing the math now and I wonder if Steve stopped counting somewhere along the way.)

So we spent a few hours in Hendersonville, which I wouldn't include on the itinerary of future travelers who haven't been camp counselors there in the past, but satisfied Steve just fine.

It was Sunday when it began to dawn on me that friends come to see you, not the town in which you live. Steve kindly showed interest in our drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway, but brunch at Tupelo Honey was probably a bigger highlight for him. By dinner it was okay to go to a recommended sushi restaurant in a strip mall because if he had any opinion of Asheville, he'd formed it already, and taking him to a strip mall restaurant wasn't going to make me seem any less cool than I am. Which is cool enough to not like the idea of eating at strip mall restaurants but not so cool that I refuse to do it.

We spent Monday morning walking Audrey, and I finally got it. I've known Steve for 14 years. He's the one who brought me dinner the night after I had surgery on my toes and discovered I couldn't make it off my couch to find food. (To this day, I wonder why I told him a plain bagel would satisfy my hunger when I hadn't eaten all day and, even more, why he believed me.) He let me use his guest room for extended stays when I lived in Williamsburg and sanity demanded that I escape to DC every chance I had. He always spent some part of his visits to St. Louis fixing something in my house. Even when he visited us in Long Beach, where there were plenty of activities on offer, he took the time to play photographer for the last of my series of Roxanne holiday cards.

So, really, I was judging Asheville when Steve had no intention of judging it himself. I've always lived in destination cities -- Los Angeles, New York, DC. Even Williamsburg annually hosts more tourists than most U.S. cities, though I'm not sure why. And when I lived in St. Louis I was on a quest to show my coastal friends that there really is a thing or two to do in the midwest. There was always so much city to help with the entertaining I somehow forgot which one of us my friends were visiting.

Not that Asheville isn't a lovely place to see as well. There's the Nature Center and the Biltmore Estate, the galleries downtown, and the Grove Park Inn, and the Folk Art Center. But they all -- with the exception of the Biltmore Estate -- seem so unassuming next to the places I'm used to taking visitors.

And that, I suppose, is the crux of what I discovered as we head into our spring visitor season. When people come to visit me here, they will see that at some point over my years of living in destination cities, I've become a person who lives in Asheville. Someone who plays with her child until 11:00 on a Saturday, heads out to some local attraction, and might even go out to dinner in a strip mall.

Okay, so I'm no longer the young, single woman hopping amongst the bars on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. My friends love me anyhow, or so they tell me. They love who I am now, not who I think I used to be, and I don't need to apologize for it any more than I need to apologize for Asheville.

Besides, come to think of it, I never really spent much time in those Columbus Avenue bars even when I could.