The Blue and Smokey hills

May in the south has been cool and rainy, thoughts of the Northwest and Seattle have been hard to avoid and we both are feeling a bit homesick... We have landed in the foothills of western North Carolina, just outside of the Smokey National Park. They don't mince words down here and the area we find ourselves in is called the blue mountains and the Great Smokeys for obvious reasons. Its gorgeous out here, no doubt about it. The farm land is straight out of a dream, or a movie, or a storyteller's imagination- y'know, something that seems too good to be true. The rolling green hills are lush and fertile and there is an amazing history of Appallachian mountaineers who really knew what homesteading was about, although that is being lost quickly and industrial agriculture and nonsustainable practices seem to be the norm here now. We are staying with a family who run a Timber framing business out of their home and ancestral land. Daniel has been hard at work fulltime learning the ancient trade, and its right up his alley, we're both excited about the possibilities it opens up and inspires. I'm putting together their family garden so they will be eating yummy organic foods all summer! We will be staying around a month, just a couple more weeks left, and then exploring the area a bit before we head north for the summer. The people around here aren't quite as sweet as the ones we met in Georgia, mountaineers are a quiet and reserved bunch, but we've been staying in just one area so hopefully when we explore a bit we'll find more kindred spirits! We look forward to seeing a little of Tennessee and Kentucky if we can manage it as well, and these days bluegrass is about all we listen to. The accents here are different as well, less languid and more bubbly. G's are dropped as a matter of course, "and everythang" is tagged on to most sentences, and when you walk into a room full of people you say "Mayonnaise a lot of folk heah!"