Why, Asheville, I do declare!

After the excesses of Disney World and Miami Beach, Asheville, North Carolina, was a very welcome relief. A small and compact town which has banished its chain shops to its fringes (even some locals were asking us where the mall was), Asheville seems to have had a number of lucky breaks in its history to even out the economic decline of the mid-twentieth century that has preserved all its gorgeous old buildings. A Vanderbilt decided it would be a good place to put his faux gothic chateau-esque mansion in the 1890s, and people (first guests and now tourists) have been flocking to this ostentatious building ever since. Young Vanderbilt went to Europe, like what he saw, and wanted it all. He sure got it, but this really isn't a good thing. I preferred the Singer Sargent and Whistler portraits to their architecturally messy settings. They did, however, have very interesting information on the restoration of some of the rooms during the 1980s, including a video of a dude handprinting wallpaper.

As well as the Biltmore Estate, Asheville also has a lively little downtown area filled with art deco buildings, boutiques, chocolate shops, vegetarian restaurants and arts and crafts. This brings us to the next lucky break. Artists of all kinds abound in this place. Some of the Bauhaus staff, including Anni and Josef Albers, relocated to nearby Black Mountain after the Nazis shut down the school in Germany, and the area has a very strong arts community still. There is a lot of local pride in the locally made, with most stores displaying a sign reading "Put your $ where your <3 is. Shop Asheville." Our most exciting discovery in Asheville was that Jon (or perhaps Jocelyn!) has been leading a double life as a restaurateur. Doc Chey's Noodle House serves excellent Asian fusion food and hilarious fermented tea that tastes kind of like sweet carbonated vinegar. We were pleased that the food at a place sharing Jon's uncommon name was so good.

After spending about five days in Asheville, we drove south to Charleston. Suzi and I went on a ghost tour where we saw no ghosts but learned a lot about Charleston's history (gruesome murders, mass deaths from explosions in battle, that kind of thing). Unlike the one we took in Edinburgh where they locked us in a mausoleum, this tour was quite sanitised in where we went. So the tour guide told us about these locations where pirates were hanged, where the inn keepers had a racket to kill people and hide the bodies in the cellar, where a woman haunts the graveyard waiting for her husband who died in Baltimore to return to her, but we didn't go to any of them. It was a nice way to see a lot of the old town and hear about the history nonetheless.

Charleston's wealth was originally gained from rice crops, so we went out to two plantations the next day. The first was Drayton Hall, a lovely Palladian and Georgian 18th century house which has been preserved rather than restored by the National Trust. No furniture, no expensive knick-knacks, no tourists. Excellent. They also had a fascinating talk about the plantation's slave workforce - their origins in Africa, their culture and how it developed in America to form Gullah, a language and culture which is still alive today. The second was next door at Magnolia. Also owned by a branch of the Drayton family, this place has had several homes on the site, but people keep burning them down. After the Civil War had ended, former slaves went through the neighbourhood burning the sites of their oppression, including Magnolia but sparing Drayton Hall, where yellow flags had apparently been put out to indicate the presence of contagious illness. So the current house is the hunting lodge, shipped down the river and put up in place of the burned plantation house. A particular fixation of our guide was the value of objects rather than how the objects tell us about the lives of those who lived there. Apparently, a vase is like a man - much more attractive when you know how much it's worth. We also discovered during the "From Slavery to Freedom" tour that the descendants of slaves still work on the property, not as tour guides but as gardeners. No wonder there aren't a lot of African-American tourists around these parts.

Next stop: Chicago's intensive architecture history lesson.