Wandering from creekside through Spanish Class to Chimney Rock

Flat Creek when it's behaving itself.  There is nothing flat about it, full of rocks, tumbling from the heights down to join the various forks of the Swannanoa River in Black Mountain NC.

It's rainy today, with spats of heavy showers, and much grey sky.  It's also not only terrifically humid (like 100%) but hot (at least upper 70s) though not as bad as some thermometers in the world these days.

I enjoyed a Spanish conversation class at the Lakeview Center today...some folks (not all seniors) drop by to share sentences they've formed with key words that they drew from a box of vocabulary words.  Then everyone else tries to guess what the sentences mean.  Some of us are a bit more advanced than others, and thankfully they correct the rest of us.

I had the stunning experience of my brain just plain freezing up.

I couldn't say anything except, "my brain has stopped working".  I'm grateful that I could still say that...as the gestures of holding my head might have been misinterpreted...in either language.  So that's what I get for trying to form conversation in Spanish.  I hope I can entice my brain to work a bit better.  That's the point, after all.  I'm not planning to use Spanish in traveling, or even with some of the Hispanic people in Black Mountain.

 I just want my brain to keep working. And learning new things is supposed to be better than doing things we already know how to do, over and over again.  Now I know that I got to a point today in forming new neural pathways, where there was either a road block, or my ability to follow any pathway in my brain took a break.

Not too far down the road from Black Mountain, is Chimney Rock, a great cliff on each side of another river valley (gorge perhaps) which leads to Lake Lure.  You can't tell that the chimney is over on the right, separate from the cliff face.  No wonder some of this was the setting for "Last of the Mohicans" movie.

Incidentally, I was given a heads up that the elevator has been repaired at the park so that you don't have to climb the stairs up to the look-out area.  (But for those of us with claustrophobia, be warned!)

Chimney Rock looking towards Lake Lure

 The repairs from the landslide on NC 9 are coming along, and it has one lane open, maybe not on weekends, but at least some of the time.

This is a pretty recent shot of the landslide...imagine that it had been totally covered by the trees which fell, and the road repair crew had to build a road of some kind to get to the top to removed trees and grade it.  No wonder it's taken 2 months.