DINNER RECOMMENDATION: DECEMBER

Our guests who like authentic Thai food have started discovering one of the newest restaurants in Black Mountain, Thai Basil. It's a locally owned restaurant, with a second location in Asheville. Thai Basil in Black Mountain is open for lunch (noon to 3pm) and dinner (5pm-9:30pm) seven days a week, which is great because many restaurants are closed on Sunday or Monday.

We only hear great things about Thai Basil. They will tailor your meal to whichever level of "spicy" is best for you. The spring rolls get rave reviews, as does the Tom Yum soup. They have a variety of noodle and curry dishes, plus several chef's specials, including Spicy Catfish and Bangkok Chicken. Be sure to order Thai Iced Tea with your meal.

Thai Basil's Black Mountain restaurant is located on West State Street, just past Cherry. When you see the elephant sculpture outside, you'll know you've arrived at a great new place to eat in town.

DREAMING OF A WHITE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS

Whew! We've had quite a busy week. How about you? We had family over (Brigette's brother and sister-in-law, plus the most well-behaved dog on the planet, Count Chocula), and we had a fabulous dinner and a great Christmas.

Then someone (not us) ordered up a white Christmas and it arrived the day after.



If you've ever seen the movie A Christmas Story where the snow is coming down at the end and the mom turns out the living room light and they watch the perfect snowfall, that's what it felt like. The snow was really pretty and, OK, we may have missed having snow in December. It was nice to have this snowfall, which melted later in the day. A good balance.

Shortly after Christmas, our friends from Ohio came to visit and we got to catch up. And hang out with the very talkative, very active, extremely cute 1-year-old, Roman.



Csaba the innpug just adores his buddy Roman. The happiest we have ever seen Csaba was when he met Roman for the first time last year. Csaba has missed Roman a lot. He made up for missed time with hundreds of pug kisses, though.

We're now settling in for a relaxing New Year's Eve, where we'll be toasting the new year and thinking up some fun resolutions for 2008.

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all our friends and family and the approximately 1,000 guests we've been fortunate to host since we've been here in April. We wish everyone lots of happiness for 2008!

We have some really fun guests staying in the Lake House (and a super cute Maltese named Isis, who, by the way, put Csaba and Bugsy in their place even though she weighs about a quarter of what Bugsy does...), but for the most part, we'll be having a very low-key Christmas. Most of our family and friends are in Ohio and we sure do miss them.

We are pretty excited, though, because a couple of days after Christmas, we have some very special guests coming. Well, Csaba may be the most excited one of all, because it's this little guy and his mom and dad. Oh, and by the way, his mom has NO idea...until now!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

TERRACE CONTINUED

We're wrapping up work on the Terrace Suite and we have a few photos to share with you. The painting is finished and the curtains are up. We don't want to unveil the whole thing just yet as we have a few very minor details to add, but here are a few teasers:







More to come soon.

Special thanks to Melissa for her work on the throw pillows...they're perfect!

LET IT SNOW...BUT NOT STICK

This week, we had our first snowfall. The snow fell, but it didn't stick on the ground. It was more of a "dancing snowflake" kind of snow, just in time for the arrival of our guests from Florida, John and Lisa, who don't get snow where they live. The snowflake ballet lasted all day. Very pretty!

We hear our friends up north got several inches of the white stuff. Stay warm, everyone!

Although the temps are reaching into the 50s during the day (and we can't believe how sunny it is, almost all day every day!), it's been in the 20s overnight the past few nights -- which is perfect weather for enjoying a cup of hot cocoa and snuggling up in front of one of our Inn's many in-room fireplaces.

Or you can be like Bugsy and Csaba, our resident innpugs, who very much enjoy wrapping up in a blanket on a cool evening:

AN INTRO TO DAVIDSON'S FORT

As newcomers to western North Carolina, we were excited to learn recently about Davidson's Fort, a project in Old Fort that has been steadily building momentum since early 2006.

The Davidson name is a familiar one in our area's rich local history. In the 1700s, the Davidsons lived where the town of Old Fort now stands, on property owned by Samuel Davidson. The property also included a grist mill on Davidson's Mill Creek, now known simply as Mill Creek (the Long Branch of which runs along our property and provides the water for the Andrews Geyser).

Up until 1776, the Old Fort area was the westernmost outpost of colonial settlement. A fort was constructed in August of 1776, built by General Griffith Rutherford. From the Davidson's Fort website: In the University of North Carolina Magazine, Volume 1, Number 4, an article appears by David L. Swain, dated 1852, speaking to the stockade at the old fort...Pension applications from members of Rutherford’s militia describe their duties including construction of a fort (on property owned by none other than Samuel Davidson). The fort was used as a staging area for General Rutherford's Expedition agains the Cherokee, in which a band of 5,000 local militiamen fought against the Cherokee (who had sided with the British). This was the largest patriot militia campaign of the Revolutionary War.

According to the Swannanoa Valley Museum, Samuel Davidson was the first-known settler to have taken his family across the Blue Ridge, when the North Carolina General Assembly opened all lands north of the divide between the Swannanoa and Toe Rivers to immigrant settlement shortly after the Revolutionary War. In 1784, Davidson built a cabin at the foot of Jones Mountain. He was killed by a band of Cherokee hunters but his family survived, escaped back to Davidson's Fort 16 miles away, regrouped, and returned to the Swannanoa Valley, leading western settler expansion. Samuel Davidson and the Davidson family are often given credit for paving the way for the creation of western North Carolina cities such as Asheville.

Fast forward to March 2006: Mark Hall, a McDowell County native, and Gary Jones, a retired military man with an interest in the Revolutionary War period, partnered together to buy 18 acres of land in Old Fort with the idea of constructing a replica of Davidson's Fort (the exact original location of which is currently unknown).

The fort, currently under construction thanks to donations, will be used for school education programs, visitor self guided tours and as a location for war re-enactments. (The annual Battle of the Blue Ridge, a Civil War re-enactment, took place here last year).

We're enthusiastic about the idea of having a great piece of history just down the road, and we look forward to posting updates on the fort's progress.

MORE METEORS

Photo by Alan Dyer

Time for another annual meteor shower! August brought the Perseids, last month we had the Leonids and this time, we'll be treated to the Geminids, which occur every year during December. This shower is named after the constellation Gemini, from which the meteors appear to fly on their path across the sky.

Although the meteor shower happens at a time when it's pretty chilly for many people to be outside, those who can score a clear night and don't mind the cold are in for a spectacular show.

The peak of the meteor shower will happen in the wee hours of December 15th; however, we've heard from guests that the shooting stars were out in full force as early as this past Tuesday night.

Even though the peak is estimated to be early on Saturday, you'll have plenty of viewing opportunities on Friday evening since the nights are long in December,

We're heading outdoors tonight to see what we can see in the beautiful night sky above the Inn.

A WARM SPELL

Being from Ohio, we've come to expect a little blustery, chilly, snowy weather in December. Well, here it is, December 10, and it's 75 degrees and sunny here in western North Carolina. We saw snow on some of the Craggy Mountains above the town of Black Mountain over Thanksgiving and we were sure that more of the white stuff was on its way to us. But we've been pleasantly surprised by the pleasantly warm weather. We have the windows open today, which seems bizarre for us northerners.

Supposedly it will be in the upper 60s and lower 70s this week and then the 50s next week...we'll take it!

Now, if we can only get our plants to understand that it's still late fall, winter has yet to come, and they need to stay "asleep" ... our forsythia has been blooming for the past few months. Here's a shot of one bloom around the beginning of November:



The leaves are gone now, but the forsythia bushes just keep on blooming. We did a little research and it turns out that when a forsythia bush blooms in fall, those are actually the blossoms that should have been reserved for the following spring. So, we're curious to see just how much these bushes bloom next year.

SHAKE, RATTLE AND ROLL

The beginning of December has been more exciting than we had anticipated. At around 6am this morning, Brigette was fast asleep with a couple of innpugs keeping her warm. Dave was in the office on the internet, reading up on the soapstone wood stoves that we have in the house. [As an aside, Dave is a morning person... Brigette, ehh, not so much].

Just after the furnace kicked on at 6am, Dave felt something "shake the house" for about 3 seconds. His first reaction was, 'That was an earthquake!'... but then he thought that was probably a little unlikely (and dramatic), especially since we're still new to the house and not completely familiar with everything. Plus, it was very coincidental that it happened so close to the furnace coming on. He went upstairs and downstairs, inside and outside to see if anything else could account for the house rattling.

But, nothing seemed amiss. No damage or anything wrong with the mechanical systems of the house. So, Dave's next line of logical reasoning was, "Once you've eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains, no matter how unlikely, must be true." So he came down and said to a sleepy Brigette, "I think there was an earthquake!" Brigette rolled the innpugs out of bed, came upstairs, looked online at the news, and sure enough, the US Geological Survey had reported a 3.1 magnitude earthquake at 6:07am, about 30 miles from Asheville.

Then we got to thinking, how many earthquakes has western North Carolina had? We found a map of earthquake epicenters from 1698 to 1997. Turns out that North Carolina isn't a big earthquake area, so this should probably be a local/regional news item for today.

TERRACE PAINTING BEGINS

You may have noticed on the availability schedule that the Terrace room is blocked off for the next two weeks. That's because we'll be doing some painting. Serious painting.

Currently, the wall color is what one guest has described as billiard table green. Although it's not a bad color, it's not really our earthy style. So we're kicking up the color a notch and creating a two-tone room, with a copper-colored fireplace as one of the focal points. The fireplace (currently white) goes from floor to vaulted ceiling so the added color should make a big difference in how you see the room.

The existing bathroom tile is blue, and we like it, so we'll continue the copper color into the bathroom for one of the walls to create a little warm contrast. We may even put the copper tone in the Terrace's hot tub room (until we get the mountain mural done that we've been visualizing for the past six months...).

Colors are below. Wall colors are River Sand and River Mud. Fireplace and bathroom wall color is Copper Mine. The wall colors scanned a bit darker than the actual swatches. All paint is by Behr and can be bought at The Home Depot.