Tuesday, November 28, 2014

We awoke to yet another stunningly beautiful day and gave thanks to God above for blessing us, as He always does, on our getaway weekend. Today, after breakfast and making sandwiches for lunch, we got into the car and made the hour long drive to Dupont National Forest for some more hiking.  We had picked up some information yesterday at the Asheville Chamber of Commerce on hiking trails in the area, specifically looking for locations used in The Hunger Games movies.  The location we chose was the closest and included the waterfall where Katniss found Peeta in the first movie after she dropped the beehive on some of their fellow Hunger Games participants.  It took us a little bit to find the trailhead we wanted, but once we did we first made a trip to the visitor's center where a very helpful gentleman showed us on a 3 dimensional map of the area just where we were and the trail that we had chosen.  It is a 3 mile round trip hike with only a moderate change in elevation.  Just what we were looking for.

on the trail

View from our lunch spot

We hiked to Triple Falls, where the Little River drops in elevation over three successive waterfalls.  There is a staircase off the trail that takes one down about 100 steps to the rocks you can see in the picture above.  Turns out that this was fall break for most of the local schools so we ran into lots of families that were out hiking and this seemed to be a pretty popular spot.  Kathi and I found a shady spot on a rock that let us enjoy the sound of the waterfalls along with feeling a bit of spray occasionally when the wind blew our way to sit and enjoy our lunch.  It was quite a warm day (mid 70's or so) and we had worked up a bit of a sweat on our hike so that spray felt wonderful.  Again, those made at home sandwiches after some exercise tasted like one of the best sandwiches ever, then we just sat and enjoyed the place and the day for a while.

After letting lunch settle for while, we made our way up the 100 or so steps and set out for the return trip to the car, which only took us a half hour or so.  Upon returning back to Asheville, we made a grocery store stop to gather a few items for dinner that evening.  We still had some uncooked chicken breasts left that I used to make baked Parmesan chicken.  Kathi worked on homework while I made dinner.  We stayed in for the rest of the evening and just enjoyed our meal and one another's company, knowing that this was the last evening of Girls Weekend 2014.  Tomorrow, we need to make the drive to Greenville, South Carolina for our flights home.  We decided that we would spend the morning hanging out at the cool bookstore (the wi-fi connection there was MUCH better than we had in the cabin) until it was time for us to hit the road.

Another wonderful day!