Gotta Get Ready

The next two days K and I will be spending most of our time getting the house ready and packing for our vacation. We'll arrive in Asheville, NC, on Monday and leave on Thursday and we plan on spending Thursday and Friday driving up to Cleveland, OH. I'm really hoping to get in a few breweries while in Asheville (the town probably has the most breweries per capita of any in the Southeast and probably by far), but I don't know how much drinking time I'll have. K's parents will be there the last two days of our Asheville leg and my parents are going to be around as well. The good news is that means we have a baby sitter for E to go out one night. The bad news is that I have to take into account the tourism desires of more than just K. With K it's easy. I give her half of the vacation for her stuff and I get half of it for me, meaning about a quarter of our vacation would be beer geek stuff. Now it gets divided down to something like 2 percent beer geek stuff. That's a lot of percentage points knocked off. Que sucky.

But, if I were able to do everything I wanted to do in Asheville, here'd be my spots to visit:

1. Wedge Brewing. This place just opened up a few days more than a month ago. I can't pass up something that new.

2. Asheville Pizza and Brewing. I like pizza and I like beer. Supposedly they do both pretty well and I've never had their beer. That last part is enough to send me visiting. Oh, they also show movies. Sweet. (Courtney, scroll to the bottom of the screen. You'd like this place.)

3. Green Man Brewing at Jack of the Woods. This place is downtown and will most definitely be a place I actually do visit. I've had a couple of their beers when they sent casks to the Atlanta Cask Ale Festival, but never at the brewpub.

4. French Broad Brewery. This place hosts live music despite being a production brewery instead of a brewpub and there's a Texas bluegrass group playing on July 8, meaning I may sneak away from the rest of the group that night to try out their beers and listen to some music. K can tag along if she wants to, but she always feels guilty leaving her parents when they're around.

5. I don't really need to visit Highland Brewing Co. I've already had almost all of their beers and once you've seen one microbrewery, you've seen most of them. However, they are a part of the Asheville Brews Cruise, which I could take and hit three of the breweries on my list. Mickey and Courtney, would you be interested in this? There's one on the 9th and the tour only makes if at least four people sign up. I don't want to sign up for it and K and I be the only ones on a Wednesday. I hate to get my hopes up like that only to have them dashed because I'm the only beer dork in wanting to go on a pub crawl that day.

There are a couple of recommended beer bars up there like Thirsty Monk and Dirty Jacks, but then I'd like to save some time for hiking in the mountains around Asheville and whitewater rafting and maybe a little flatwater kayaking. Sounds fun, huh? Instead, it'll be a couple of hours of hiking and a lunch at Asheville Pizza and the bluegrass show at French Broad. Can you believe how much I'm having to sacrifice? They should make a saint out of me or something. Saint Aledork, patron saint of beer geeks everywhere.