Our last full stretch in Asheville started with an unexpected alarm clock — squirrels. What felt like an entire crew of them perched high in the trees above our site, aggressively eating nuts and launching shells directly onto the roof of the Lineage. The shells were everywhere on the ground. Little guys weren’t even trying to hide the evidence.
Grove Arcade & Downtown Asheville
The sun finally made an appearance — something we hadn’t seen in what felt like the better part of a week — so we hopped in the Jeep and made the short 15-minute drive into downtown Asheville. Our destination was the Grove Arcade, which, despite the name, does not have Pac-Man or other cool 80’s games. Chad was briefly optimistic.
The Grove Arcade dates back to the 1920s, when developer E.W. Grove set out to build one of America’s first indoor shopping malls. Completed in 1929, it served as a community hub of shops and local vendors. During World War II, the federal government took over the building for military and administrative use, and it stayed that way for decades. The city reclaimed it in the late 1990s and reopened it in 2002, restored to its original purpose as a public market. Today, the food hall inside feels like a natural evolution of that vision — local vendors, food stalls, and a whole lot of craft beer options.
We didn’t leave empty-handed on the arcade front, though. Nearby, we found the Asheville Pinball Museum — $17 for an hour of unlimited play, with classic arcade games alongside the pinball machines. Robotron was in there! Chad was happy. We’re definitely going back.
Downtown Asheville is genuinely one of those places where you can park once and just wander for hours. Historic architecture, local shops, restaurants, craft breweries, street performers, live music — it’s all right there within easy walking distance.
Tackling the Toilet Seal (Again)
Back at the rig, Chad made another attempt at fixing a slow toilet seal leak that had been pestering us. In the previous video, he’d greased only the ball-facing side of the rubber seal, which helped but didn’t fully solve it. This time around, he pulled the entire seal out and greased it all the way around, suspecting it might be leaking behind the seal rather than at the face. While he had it apart, he noticed the left side of the ball valve felt slightly loose, so he reseated it before putting everything back together.
Problem solved!
No Taste Like Home – Foraging Tour
This was the one Tara had been looking forward to for well over a year. She’d found a company in Asheville called No Taste Like Home that offers guided foraging tours, and despite a stubborn headache, she was determined to make it happen.
The setup is part of the appeal — you find out your meeting location the night before, because the guides scout the area first and choose a spot with a good abundance of edible plants. It ended up being a leisurely three-hour stroll through the woods, nothing strenuous, just a relaxed walk with experts pointing out what was around us the whole time.
The guide’s opening safety briefing was memorable: watch for poison ivy (it’s a shapeshifter — sometimes two leaves, sometimes more), do a thorough tick check before bed, there are copperheads and rattlesnakes in the area, though they’ve never seen one on that property, and yes, there are bears.
Once we got moving, the amount of edible life in those woods was genuinely surprising. The Blue Ridge region, including the Smokies, is one of the richest fungal areas in North America — somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 recorded species in the broader Appalachian Blue Ridge region alone, with a few hundred of those being edible and around 20 to 30 that are most commonly foraged.
We learned to identify smooth chanterelles (white flesh inside, unlike the toxic jack-o-lantern mushroom, which is orange through and through and grows in clusters at the base of trees — also bioluminescent, apparently), black trumpets, cinnabar chanterelles, turkey tail mushrooms, and milkcap mushrooms. On the plant side, we sampled smartweed (also called lady’s thumbprint — mild, a little like bland lettuce but nutritious), wood sorrel with a bright citrusy pop that the guide said works well diced over fish or mushrooms, and a wintergreen twig that tasted exactly like you’d expect and apparently used to be the primary commercial source of wintergreen flavor before synthetics took over. The guide called it the hiker’s toothbrush. We also tasted violet leaves — one cup has as much vitamin C as roughly six oranges — and covered dandelion greens, autumn olives, and edible flowers like jewelweed.
The tour wrapped up with the guides cooking chanterelles and black trumpets with crispy dandelion greens for the whole group. Everyone got to take home a share of what we’d foraged. It’s a brief introduction to what’s really a deep rabbit hole, but that’s kind of the point — to flip a switch and make you see the woods differently.
That night, Tara sautéed some of the mushrooms and put them on pizza. She went full forager with wood sorrel and mushrooms on her half. Chad just wanted the mushrooms. They cook down more than you’d expect — shrinkage is real — but the flavor made it worth it.
Wrapping Up Asheville
We ended up leaving one day ahead of schedule. The original plan included a stop at Cade’s Cove to do the Wednesday e-bike loop, where they close the road to cars — something we’d been wanting to try — but with Tara dealing with recurring headaches that had kept her down for roughly 30 of the past 40 days, it didn’t make sense to push it. Add to that the fact that Newfound Gap through the national park was closed, which would have forced a significant detour anyway, and the decision got a lot easier.
Instead, we pointed the Lineage toward our cabin for a week to regroup. Short drive, familiar roads, and the kind of reset that’s hard to put a price on. Up next, one more trip in the Lineage, then back in the Momentum!
Related 🎥
Links 🔗
- Grove Arcade: grovearcade.com/
- Asheville Pinball Museum: ashevillepinball.com/
- White Duck Taco Shop: whiteducktacoshop.com/
- No Taste Like Home (Foraging Tour): notastelikehome.org/
Products 🛒
- Slik Seal Plumbers Grease: lanes.link/slik-seal-plumbers-grease
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