Best Places: Holiday
I’ve been agonizing over this post–it has made me shake my fist in the air at the travel channel since I challenged myself to follow the ‘Best Place I’ve Ever Been’ lineup with ‘Best Of…’ lists of my own. This one is the most difficult. Why? Because holiday travel is typically two things I strongly dislike–expensive and crowded. So I’ve never traveled over a holiday.
Or have I?
It seems I’m forgetting one very note-worthy holiday, during which I am typically out of town for one reason or another (the ‘one reason’ being ‘because it is summer, and that’s when I can travel’). The Fourth of July. And the best place I’ve ever been for the Fourth of July is not a beach side resort town. It is not a local campground or a national park or even my own back yard. The very best place to celebrate the Fourth of July is at Wildacres Writers’ Workshop in the amazingly beautiful mountains of North Carolina.
This is in case you didn't believe me about the 'amazingly beautiful' part.
Surprisingly, when I looked back in my posts to link the Wildacres post to this one, I discovered something shocking–there IS no Wildacres post! Why? I didn’t start this blog until after I returned. Woah. I simply cannot imagine a my life without this blog, but there it is–a memory from before Blog on the Run. I attended Wildacres two summers ago, in July of 2009–two short weeks before this blog was born.
That year, the workshop happened to fall over the Fourth of July. Of course we had a party, complete with box wine (if I ever doubted that I was born to be a writer, those doubts have been erased by how well ‘wine’ and ‘writing’ go together!) Judi, the amazing woman who runs the workshop, had a little patriotic assembly where several attendees read portions of the Declaration of Independence. It was quite…cute. We had hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill, and then when the sun went down we all drank aforementioned wine on the flagstone patio whilst musically talented writers played acoustic guitars and sang Tupelo Honey.
Man I love that song.
Best. Holiday. Ever.
I did not return to Wildacres last year, mainly because we were in Europe (or was it Vegas?) during that week. And this year it is not over the Fourth of July holiday. But I’ll still be there. And there will still be wine and Van Morrison covers and foggy mountain mornings.
Is it July yet?
And here I’ve been trying to convince you that NC was worth visiting… and you knew it all along.
LOL!
Toni–yes, I did. I just need to get my husband to visit sometime. Perhaps when he’s not teaching in the summer, he can accompany me to Wildacres and become hooked. I drove through this little town on my way down the mountain–called something like Turkey Chapel or Turkey Hollow (I don’t remember which, but it was definitely one of the two…you’ll see why in a minute.) About fifteen seconds after I saw the ‘Welcome to Turkey ____’, I rounded a bend, dipped into a hollow, passed a chapel, and encountered a clump of turkeys in the middle of the road! And I thought–‘Yep. That’s an aptly named village.’
I was in the UK one year over the 4th of July. We were driving around the UK for three weeks. We were in Cornwall, we saw a B&B sign at a beautiful cottage, we stopped and they had two weeks (there was four of us) this was on the 3rd. The next morning when we went to breakfast the owners had put a little American flag on the table and said Happy Fourth to us. And they served us a fantastic breakfast.
Robin–what a great story and a fantastic 4th of July. Thanks for sharing! I also appreciate the irony. The Fourth of July in England–nice!
We were in Scotland over the Fourth a few years ago. We noticed that the supermarkets and bars had Fourth of July specials – I think the notion of independence from England has some appeal there…