What a great weekend! Here’s hoping you and yours had a wonderful and Happy Thanksgiving, and that you, as do we, have plenty to be thankful for. And for us? We were most particularly thankful for having two great children that we are so proud of.

Laugh? I don’t remember laughing so hard as I did this weekend. But we’ll get back to that.

We did something we have never done before: we rented a house (AirBNB), in Asheville, NC, and both kids met up there for the entire weekend.

We celebrated Thanksgiving with my brother and his wife and their neighbors, which was very cool.

Got art? Asheville, if you have never been, is unique. This is a town that sits at elevation in the western North Carolina mountains, attracts a wide range of interesting folks, and has an incredibly cool vibe going on.  At the moment, Asheville and the surrounding area (all of the southeast) are experiencing threat from the forest fires nearby. The smoke is thick, the ground is dry, wind is blowing and no rain for months. Hopefully this coming week will provide some respite.

We arrived Wednesday and with a little time on our hands decided to have a late lunch/early dinner at the Sierra Nevada Brewery. If you have never been to this brewery, you are in for a treat. If the Biltmore Estate had a brewery, it would look like this.

Thanksgiving found us at my brothers’ house and we enjoyed a fantastic day, which included our family traditional “Flintlock”. Flintlocks, a time honored tradition that originated at the Colonial Inn in Concord, MA, is a drink to be respected. As described in the original recipe as ascertained by my father, it cannot be served to minors, redcoats, or hostile Indians.

We (whenever I mention good ideas and planning in the same sentence, that means my bride was instrumental and I was the driver) rented a place in the Montford historic district in Asheville. This is a particularly nice part of town with eclectic but nice homes. What is particularly awesome about these homes is they have beautiful and large front porches.

Friday was a great day for walking the town, and that is exactly what we did. The challenge with all that walking around is that one can get parched. Did I mention there are a bodacious number of breweries in Asheville? Well, after all, we were there to support small businesses.

We started at a brewery call Bhramari. The brews were good (not great), the food was OK, but the service was horrible. I for one will not be racing to go back here, but the outside tables were nice.

We took a short walk and ended up at Wicked Weed, another very popular brewery, but was told there was a 90-minute wait. Tempting. Not.

Our next stop was the Lexington Avenue Brewery, better known as LAB, and this was a big success. This was a fun place to hang, had great service, decent brews and just a great vibe. Booyeah.

The drum circle was alive and well, although slightly cool temperatures limited the number of drummers. If you are not familiar with the drum circle in Asheville, these volunteer percussionists meet every Friday night (in decent weather) for an ad hoc meet-up to play drums. Extremely cool.

The highlight of the day was the Friday evening participation in the Lazoom Haunted Comedy Tour. I haven’t laughed as long and hard as I did for this one-hour evening event. This is a bus tour around the city, although frankly you are so consumed with the antics on the bus that you could have circled the block for an hour. This should most definitely be on your list of things to do here in Asheville.

Anyway, like I said, I hope you enjoyed friends and/or family and have much to be thankful for.  Happy Thanksgiving!