Goin' South.

My wife's youngest sister's baby being due shortly, we hustled down Atlanta way for a family get together and short vacation. What I found shook my preconceived notions of The South, as well as creating a great deal of fodder for Another Day.

Item 1:  Delta Airlines has lost its grip on reality.  A plane flight to Atlanta is roughly $545, but going to Asheville NC via Atlanta is only $278. Asheville is a place we've always wanted to visit. We chose Asheville as our arrival and departure destination.  Delta's pricing schedule isn't their only problem, however.  While all the airlines try to cram as many discount fare passengers into the rear of their planes (also known as "steerage" in the old days of, say, the Titanic) our Boeing 757 had seats that no adult, short of a starving Riwandan refugee, could find comfortable.

 Lacking a tape measure (not that the TSA would have let bring one onboard) I estimate the width of the so-called seats at a meager twelve inches wide, thirteen tops.  I'd like to cram a few Delta execs into those seats for four hours and get their opinion. Then again, perhaps Delta is being run these days by Riwandan refugees, which would explain a number of things.

Item 2: Flying to Asheville, rather than Atlanta required us to rent a car, which we would have had to do anyway. Here's a laugh. Enterprise Rent-A-Car describes their full-size cars on their website as "Chevrolet Impalas or similar".  Note the italics, folks. Our "similar" car, there being not an Impala to be found, was a Chevy HHR, one of those retro-styled wagons that GM introduced to steal sales away from Chrysler's popular PT Cruiser.  The HHR is based on the Cobalt, a compact by anyone's standard.  Well, bullshit, I say; a tricked-out Cobalt is still a Cobalt, not an Impala.  I fired off a Nastygram to Enterprise on my arrival home. I'll let you know the outcome.

Item 3: Forget any preconceived notion that North Carolina in general, and Asheville in particular is some backwater film set for Deliverance or Smokey and the Bandit.  I learned this the minute I pulled out of the parking lot and got passed by a Lotus Elise (!), as I, in turn passed by a sizable and well-stocked BMW dealership.

As it turns out, Asheville is one very hip place to be, with art galleries in abundance, a cranking music scene, and money being made and spent quite well, thank you.  If there's a backwater, perhaps it's here in SoCal's Inland Empire, though a Fontucky/San Bernarghetto rap-and-ranchera version of Dueling Banjos is beyond even my imagination.

In short, the Smokey Mountains are, well, smokin'.  Beautiful houses of all vintages abound, all set on generously sized lots, surrounded by thick groves of soldier-straight trees that seem to be uniformly set four feet apart and sixty feet tall.  House prices seem cheap; perhaps it's the abundance of lumber, I don't know.

Item 4:  There's a chain of restaurants out there that serves delicious, gut-busting barbecue.  I won't mention the name, however, because they tried to kill my wife. Just be warned of this if you ever encounter a roadhouse with the Lone Star state in its name.  In due fairness, the Asheville outlet is supposedly their training center, so, as the old commercials say, your mileage my vary.  In any event, it's a great tasting way to die. And, they will comp your meal if you complain. Note to the trainees: do not, repeat, do not melt plastic bags into the pulled pork. Bad idea. Very bad idea....

Item 5:  If you have the slightest interest in architecture, or what it was like to be a railroad baron back in the 19th century, you owe yourself a visit to Asheville's own Biltmore mansion, home of the Vanderbilts.  This was, and still is, the largest private home in America. You could, I suppose, try to wrap your head around the square footage (125,000), but try this: there's four and a half ACRES under one roof.

Guess what? It works. It's a beautifully designed home in the French chateau style; opulent, yes, but not garish in the way you might envision how some modern, super-rich guy might blow hundreds of millions on his crib.  Vanderbilt wanted the best, so he bought the best, starting with his architect and landscaper.  The architect? The guy who designed the base for the Statue of Liberty.  The landscape designer? The guy who created New York's Central Park.  Can you say "heavy hitters"?

Vanderbilt pumped so much money into his project that roughly one out of nine people in Asheville were employed at one time in creating Biltmore.  Vanderbilt paid well, too.  He attracted artisans to the area, and that reverberates on in the Asheville art scene to this day.  It was such a huge undertaking to build, and now operate and maintain the house (still owned by Vanderbilt's descendants) that, even now, 1,800 people work at the Biltmore during peak tourist season.

It's almost (but not quite) a pity to know that Bill Gates prefers curing disease and poverty with his billions, rather than build a 21st century competitor to the Biltmore. Gate's pad would probably look like the Biltmore, too... except it would be a) reinterpreted by I.M. Pei or Frank Gehry, and b) located in a geosyncronous orbit 22,000 miles over Redmond, Washington.  I'm not sure who he'd get for the landscaping; James Cameron, perhaps.

Coming next: Dave's march on Atlanta...