The world has discovered Asheville, anointing it the next Portland or Austin.
It’s easy to see why. This beautiful city ringed by mountains is surrounded by natural beauty and filled with breweries and a vibrant local food scene.
Plus, it’s artsy, with dreadlocked kids playing drums downtown, a great indie bookstore and a literary history that includes Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And it possesses an easy Southern charm, where you can tube down the French Broad River with several hundred friends while enjoying a cold beer.
I’ve been visiting the area for twenty years, ever since friends of mine moved from Florida to the mountains. (If you live in Florida, you retire to western NC for something different.) I’ve seen Asheville develop from a sleepy downtown lined with empty art deco buildings to a booming mountain city with a hotel rates that rival New York.
Now that city has been discovered, and overwhelmed, what’s the “next Asheville.”
To find that, go thirty minutes west. Up and over the mountains and into a valley framed by peaks. It’s Waynesville, NC.
The county seat, it’s a busy little town with a real Main Street lined with art galleries, restaurants and an old-timey Mast General Store. It’s the kind of place that you might run into your neighbors or the publisher of the local paper.
Unbelievably, the once-sleepy burg now has two indie coffee shops. Panacea in the delightfully-named Frog Level neighborhood (on the banks of the Pigeon River) and Orchard Coffee just off Main Street.
This part of the country used to be dry. Now it’s thoroughly wet and soaked in breweries. Best known is Boojum, which is named after the local Bigfoot. Down on Frog Level, you will find Frog Level Brewing. And a great place to sample beers from around Western NC (and get some good chicken wings) is Mad Anthony’s Taproom.
Waynesville is a great hub to explore the Smoky Mountains. The Blue Ridge Parkway is located just outside of town, offering opportunities to hike and take in grand vistas.
If you like the squiggly bits on the map, then Western NC is for you. My favorite drive is to take NC-276 up into Pisgah National Forest, a lovely winding road that passes Looking Glass Falls and other waterfalls. On the way back, I like NC-215, which is another serpentine route. Fun if you’re driving; less so if you’re a passenger.
The downside of being the next Asheville is growth and traffic. Publix and Chik-fil-A arrived recently, drawing crowds from around the region. During the summer and fall, Waynesville strains under the weight of visitors. Even during non-peak times, it can be tough to get a table at Boojum.
But if you’re looking for the next Asheville, you need to go just a little west. Thirty minutes outside the city, and over the mountains. Waynesville. A little colder, a little foggier, a little higher up. Not quite Asheville and no longer undiscovered, Waynesville waits for its moment.
I lived in Asheville for a while.Parking was horrible.The service in retail was poor.constantly approached by homeless and sometimes very threatening.The child care was not good and my grandson was injured by non compliance to safety.I had looked forward to living there but people have become very smug and pretentious and the price of real estate does not reflect a real value.It is exploited to say the least.The crime became horrid and a real estate woman was murdered in the afternoon in a good shopping area.She was thrown in a dumpster by a homeless man.The drug store was robbed at gunpoint at 1pm. Cars were having windows smashed in the parking lot of a good apt. complex.If you love crime on the rise, a poor job market, tourist traps, hippie for the sake of being hippie, trying to become cool when you are not, poorly maintained real estate and scores of panhandlers annoying you after you spend 35 minutes to find a parking space then Asheville is the place for you.The art community is just funky and not involved in the pursuit of quality invention, education, discovery or preservation.Preserving the environment is not at the top of the list, it is talk and no action.
I hope Waynesville is not the next Asheville. It’s my home town and it’s too small to be a big city. The roads are not designed for all the people moving in. We don’t want to be a big city. It’s not the same as it was forty years ago. That’s when it was the place to be. Not now. It’s became very liberal with alcohol flowing among other things. The good thing I’ll probably be gone when it gets as big as Asheville. Heaven is my real home anyway.