Drive. Pray. Scream?: Day 134: Heinz 57

Our day had a little bit of everything in it...just like a bottle of Heinz 57. Following a good dose of school, we explored the Blue Ridge Parkway Visitor Center and learned so much about the extraordinary craftsmanship in the region. From handmade mandolins to pottery, quilts to poetry, western North Carolina is fertile soil for amazing creativity and artistry.

One of its better-known talents was author Carl Sandburg. A Pulitzer-prize winner for his biography on Lincoln, he crafted much of his later work at the home he and his wife purchased in the 1940s, known as "Connemara." Sandburg once said that his writing was the product of "95% perspiration and 5% inspiration." Much of it was accomplished in the third-floor garrett of the house; he usually worked through the night, a schedule very different from the rest of the household, who ran the family's successful goat enterprise. (The herd held dairy records for decades, and descendants of the original herd are managed on the farm to this day.)

With some daylight hours remaining, we drove a few miles from the Sandburgs' "Connemara" to Chimney Rock State Park, so named because of an enormous monolith that is ascended by a series of stairs (we didn't count, but we'd guess the number topped 500--one way!). The views from its summit take in the spectacular scenery of Lake Lure, near which much of the movie "Dirty Dancing" was filmed. And the park itself was host for many of the scenes in "The Last of the Mohicans" (the remake with Daniel Day Lewis).

It's a very good thing that we live in the day of digital cameras; we'd go broke if we had to pay for developing all of the pictures we took on our drive home. The dusky light of sunset showcased the changing colors of the forest leaves to perfection.