Travel Blog: Asheville, NC

As my 3pm work meeting ended on Friday it was time to pack up my bag and head south to the airport for a 5pm flight to North Carolina, but first a stop in Atlanta on my way to the final destination.

Like most flight experiences I was sitting on the tarmac on Tampa intending to fly to Atlanta, when the pilot on the flight announced that Atlanta (ATL) was holding all inbound flights for 30 minutes due to storms. This was going to cut it close with my connecting flight, but I hoped with slightly delayed departure that all would be alright.

We took off and I saw the ETA at 59 minutes and I was surprised, since the original ETA for this flight was way over an hour. Of course that happiness was quickly taken as that ETA kept rising to roughly 1h 30 minutes for the flight. Watching the flight tracker we kept going around the storms and extending the flight plan we took into Atlanta.

As we landed in Atlanta my connecting flight was delayed to 8:45pm and we landed at 8:27pm so I had hope I could make it. That hope was slowly destroyed when people started standing up and unloading their bags while we were stopped in the middle of the tarmac. This led to flight attendants loudly telling these individuals to stop - who didn't. Those flight attendants then unhooked themselves and ran to the back of the flight to instill the rules in person.

This 5-10 minute delay because of eager individuals sealed my fate - by the time we de-boarded and I ran from B28 to D5 in Atlanta I had missed my connection. Arriving to my gate prior to 8:45pm but seeing a closed gate door was what I expected, but still sad none-the-less to experience.

So I got into a line of about 30 other people to work on my alternate flight. However, it seemed cool that Delta automatically booked me on a new connection since it confirmed I missed my connection from my late inbound flight. However, the flight it picked was the next day at 2pm!

That would basically destroy my weekend adventure plan to look for treasure (context) so I looked online for flights remaining that night and an Atlanta to Asheville flight was delayed like 2+ hours and was leaving at 11:27pm now. I'm guessing the automatic Delta system didn't account for delayed flights so I was hoping the support agent could do that swap for me.

The line moved very very slow when time was of the essence so I went online myself and bought a one way ticket on this delayed flight before it filled up. Once I finally got to a person 45 minutes later - they refunded my extra purchase and moved me to the late flight. So at 12:23am I landed in Asheville on a late flight.

Perhaps it was our late arrival or the normal behavior of a car rental company, but we ended up with a brand new (sub 800 miles) Ford 150 truck as our car, when we intentionally choose the cheapest tiniest car to fit on these tiny mountain roads.

So here I was driving a large truck which might be the first time ever on a prolonged drive - driving 1hr and 30 minutes to our hotel in the middle of the forest in the night. So at 2:23am we finally arrive into our hotel room to sleep and await the treasure hunting days of the morning.

Of course arriving that late delayed everything as we weren't awake until 8 and not really moving in the lobby until 9. We still had to get some supplies that we couldn't fly with and then drive to our first visit which was Quarry Falls, NC.

The whole reason we started here is I extracted some coordinates from the word search of the TreasureInside hunt and was determined to visit them. However as I stood on those rocks near the water looking at my coordinate point roughly 100-200ft away - it stood no chance of being there. It was straight up a pure rock incline that had to be 40-60% degrees of a slope. The location went against so many rules the treasure creator placed (no crossing high water, not dangerous, etc) so we determined there was no treasure at our location.

I knew this area well from Google Earth prior to arrival, but I held out faith that the digital representation didn't fully represent the actual area. So we went off to Dry Falls down the road which had no parking, but that was a visit for fun not treasure so we skipped it.

We had our 2nd location that we were less convinced on, but it relied on lining up terms (NC, SC, state, divide, eleven, sapphire) from the puzzle. You line all those terms up with lines and they all intersect at this Ellicott Rock Trail so you end up having a nice little area to check that all these intersections point to.

Getting to this trail was down a gravel road that was in poor condition, which made me feel better on having a truck in that specific instance. We found the trail head and began packing things up - this was going to be an 4.4 mile hike out to the river / state border arriving at nearly 9 miles for out/back. However in terms of time and distance to a road in a straight line - it fit the constraints of the treasure hunt.

Immediately this trail felt that it had no maintenance with some washed out areas with the rusted out culvert pipes laying around. Massive trees laying across the trail which took some detouring to bypass. With finally just overgrown nature everywhere, but maybe that's the price you pay for hiking in the summer months.

There were some gaps like shown above that had ample head room and plenty of space to walk, but those areas were hiked quickly leading right back to the tough forest areas where you had to compare to the AllTrails application to ensure you were actually on the trail.

However, since we only saw 3 people (2 groups) the entire hike and it was quite a desolate experience it felt like it fit the puzzle theme of "no one will randomly stumble upon a treasure". We were still 3 miles from our car and hadn't hit 2 hours of hiking yet which matched some guidelines from the puzzle creator.

As we finally got to the border line and corner of South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia this was the area our 2nd puzzle guess location was at. In one direction we had the river and the other direction a massive cliff face so we looked around in that area.

We found some charcoal which suggested someone had camped here and some random rocks that didn't belong, but of course no treasure. I thought some marker would exist at the connection of these borders, but we spotted nothing. The sad news arrived when we realized the river current was too strong and too high to attempt crossing.

Thus we realized we had to turn around and go back up the mountain all the way back to our car. This was a grueling hike as we knew every encounter that awaited us on the journey back and somehow spiders had remade their webs in the few short hours it took to get back to an area.

It started raining which turned the entire trail into a slightly muddy & wet hike. We had to go more uphill than downhill on the way back which slowed our progress and turned this into a 5+ hour hike. It was a grind of a hike for sure with no treasure found.

As we got back to the car I had to drive this massive Ford 150 through the mountains as a brutal rain storm went on. So now that I've driven that truck through the most extreme circumstances on the road I feel I can drive it anywhere - its just very difficult to park that car in any small area.

As we showered and cleaned up we relied on some friends who had connectivity while were in a no-signal zone to find us a place to eat.

This looked like the place where the locals went based on the popularity, bar seating and outdoor seating all packed with patrons. A homemade sangria with Greek salad and meat heavy pizza is what we dug into to fill our stomach from a day of failed treasure hunting.

The service was great and friendly people all around with some solid food. We passed out shortly after this visit to prepare for our last day of maybe hiking, wineries or breweries before heading back to the airport.

The morning arrived with no sign of additional injuries so we thankfully avoided any sort of poison leaf and prepared to head into Asheville. Our treasure hunting was over as we exhausted every possible location we expected to visit and one of us was hurting a bit from the 9 mile hike of 2,800ft of elevation changes.

It took about an hour and half and we pulled into the downtown Asheville district which was a wonderful little area. They had breweries, arcades, museums, basketball courts, pickle-ball courts, food and more. My only fear was trying to find a place to park in this massive F150, but thankfully found a strip of parked cars where two parallel spots in a row were empty. This extra gap allowed me to parallel park the car without looking like a total idiot.

It seemed we were a bit too early for activities as nothing really opened till 11am and we were there around 10 something. However, we found a BBQ joint open so of course had to visit as two people who grew up in the BBQ district of Kansas City.

This place cut your protein in front of you depending on what you ordered and then had all these sides that had a variety of cost. That was a bit odd, because I just wanted like 2-3 pickles and a tiny bit of coleslaw for the sandwich. Just didn't feel full enough to get 25 pickles and a cup of coleslaw.

However, I pushed through since I wanted something and got a side of pickles for 50 cents so I could put them on my sandwich. After eating it was late enough for some bars to open up and we tried out The Funkatorium to enjoy some ciders / beers for a bit.

Killing enough time at the bar and the arcades began to open up so we could visit the Level 256 Classic Arcade Bar which unfortunately for us was opened during 1 of its 2 windows that allowed kids. We got in early and requested to play Halo 2 on the original Xbox to super-bounce, but by the time we left kids were everywhere playing Fortnite or every pinball game.

With time dwindling we went to one last bar for one drink to enjoy a bit of AC before heading for the 5pm car rental return. We funny enough ran into the same group of bikers who saw us parking at 10am and asked if we were local. They were in the same situation looking for a place open. We talked a bit more and they started their motorcycle drive from Tampa, Florida which is a small world as that is of course where I live.

Time was up for us so we took the F150 back to the rental lot which was the first time I had to park the car in an absolutely packed garage. I parked terribly but the staff member there didn't seem to care - one loop around the car he walked and we were confirmed with a car return.

Hopefully travel goes okay, but with the blog going out at 10:30pm and my ETA to getting home is 12:03am - the reader won't know if I arrived without stress or at all. Flights are getting delayed presently, but those are for storms to the north - in this situation I'm going south.