This is the third part of the posts about this year's condo trip. You really should read them in order. Here's a link to Part One. And here's a link to all the pictures from this year's trip.
All of my pictures, I believe, are captioned, so you don't have to just
guess at what you're looking at. In some applications, the captions show
at the bottom of the photo; otherwise, when you view the pictures in
Google Photos, you'll see a little "Information" icon at the top right
-- an "i" in a circle. Click on that to read the captions.
Part Three: Condo Week
Saturday, May 18
The unit we got this year is pretty nice. There are two parking places reserved for it, and a walkway crosses from the parking area to the front porch. The building has three units in it, and is set in thick woods of oak and maple, with dogwood and rhododendron understory. There's a bedroom and bath on ... let's call it "street" level. Half a flight up is the main floor: a full kitchen, with a pass-through to the living room. To the side is a dining area and fireplace, and beyond it is a large balcony looking into the woods. Half a flight down from street level is another bedroom and bathroom, along with a washer-dryer closet and a walk-in closet. There's what looks like a jacuzzi in the bathroom down there.
As soon as we got the cars unloaded, I threw a load of laundry into the tiny washing machine and we headed off for dinner. We happened upon the Grey Hawk, which is as much a garden as a restaurant. Sherry and I ordered a charcuterie board (despite Sherry's best effort to make me believe I said "soup") and a mozzarella-and-tomato sandwich to split. The food was great; the atmosphere was great; the service was perhaps the best I have ever experienced. The overall bill, with taxes and tip (and a "non-cash adjustment"; aaargh) was about $90, but if you know me you will understand just what it means when I say I think the experience was a good value. (My review of the place on Google Maps was two words: "Six stars!")
It was very late when we got back, but I had to wait up for the dryer, I thought. I ran that load of clothes through three dryer cycles before I gave up, started the thing a fourth time and went to bed. They were done when Sherry got up Sunday morning.
Sunday, May 19
Breakfast this morning was at the Victory, which Nancy tells me is a Christian-themed restaurant. Not sure what makes it that. We got a later start than I'd thought (because I was looking at the clock on my computer, which is set to Central time) and as a result we missed the beginnings of all the final-day soccer matches of the English Premier League season. Turns out not to have mattered: there were no shocking changes to the standings. Arsenal still finished second, Liverpool finished third, and the three teams promoted last year were relegated again. The only real shock was Aston Villa's collapse, which had no effect on its standings but still was surprising.
So the Victory was pretty good. The coffee was good, and the food was pretty good. My breakfast burrito was a little on the dry side. The ambience was congenial, like a family gathering at grandma's house with a lot of cousins you don't really know. The service was good but uneven. Still, I'd rate it 4 out of 5.
The weather, which was very wet yesterday, was merely damp this morning; but after we got back to the condo and watched our fill of soccer, and made our initial excursion to the grocery store, it got much nicer. Still mostly cloudy, but by the end of the day the sun was shining on the lake and photos were worth taking.
The first thing we did in the way of sightseeing was to go to the Flowering Bridge, in the town of Lake Lure. (The town is long and skinny, skirting along the southern and eastern edge of the lake itself, so going "to town" is a surprisingly time-consuming journey along narrow, twisting mountain roads.) The Flowering Bridge was the brainchild of one of the lakeside residents. When a new bridge was built where the Rocky Broad River enters the lake, she convinced the town to make the old one into a pedestrian walkway through a botanical garden. It's not that long a bridge, but they've managed to get quite an assortment of flowering and non-flowering plants into the available space. Shockingly, neither Sherry nor Nancy took a single picture on the bridge. We're going to have to go back.
Having had a late breakfast, we all skipped lunch and went straight to dinner, around 6:30 or 7 at a place called the Lake House, near the old dam that formed Lake Lure back in the 1920s. The food was good; not as awesome as what we had at the Grey Hawk the night before, but along similar lines. I had a southwestern bowl with steak on rice and corn and various veggies; it was good, and the big juicy chunks of steak were excellent (except that I'd asked for medium rare and they were more medium); Sherry had duck salad, which looked very good but I didn't taste it. I also had an ice cream and brownie dessert called a hullaballoo, which was good but unnecessary.
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| the sun comes out |
The problem with the Lake House is the service. These people are cheerful, mostly, and get the orders right, but they just have no sense of timing. Nancy asked twice to have the salads before the main courses. Both times the answer was, "Oh, sure, yeah," but the salads came out at the same time as the main courses. I asked about dessert and got a run-down of the options, then said which I would like. The waitress asked Jeff (who was still eating his main course) if he would like dessert, to which he said, "Yes, but I"m not ready yet." I had my dessert before he was done eating. And then, on the bill, in addition to their hefty "non-cash adjustment" charge, they have the gall to suggest tip amounts for 20%, 25% and 30%. I left ten percent and felt generous doing that. (We felt a slight tinge of umbrage, too, at the fact that the place is not accessible; but when Nancy asked the hostess about it she made reference to a ramp on the far side of the building; maybe it was intended as humour but came off as dismissiveness. We looked at the ramp. It's dangerously steep and has a step at the bottom and is covered with cleaning gear; I don't think it's intended as a wheelchair ramp in the first place. I think this place pre-dates the ADA and hasn't done any renovations that would require compliance.)
OKAY. I'd planned to just put up a single post to cover the entire Condo Week portion of this trip, but it's getting a little too long. So I'm going to break the week into two, or maybe three posts, and go ahead and publish this one. Look for the next installment in a few days.
