241 miles W of Raleigh

Asheville, once just a tiny mountain trading village at the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers, has grown up and turned into a year-round resort, complete with architectural gems from several eras and a lively cultural scene.

People who could have lived almost anywhere in the world, including Thomas Edison, settled in Asheville. Those Jazz Age kids, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, were among the most famous visitors. Fitzgerald arrived in the summer of 1935, recuperating from a mild case of tuberculosis, and his wife, Zelda, who had suffered a series of nervous breakdowns, was incarcerated at Highland Hospital, a private sanitarium charging $240 a month -- an exorbitant fee in those days.

The most famous person associated with Asheville is Thomas Wolfe, whose mother ran a boardinghouse here called "The Old Kentucky Home." It was disguised as "Dixieland" in Wolfe's autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Fitzgerald and Wolfe had some things in common: TB, an eye for the women, and alcohol. They even shared an editor: the famous Maxwell Perkins. Wolfe's novel (still called "that book" by old-timers in Asheville) was blacklisted here as late as 1949. Although he claimed that "you can't go home again," he eventually did, in 1938. Thousands assembled outside his mother's old boardinghouse to bid him farewell upon his premature death.