Finding Your Way in Asheville
How to use this book:This guide is based on the way real people really visit a city, or at  least the way we think real people should really visit a city. Going to  eight different places in distal parts of town in one day not only wastes  nonrenewable resources and generates air pollution, it fritters your  valuable tourist time. There is more to life than driving and parking.  Walking, particularly in a city of Asheville's walkable scale, generates  memories of gargoyles and trees and flowers and bricks and faces and sounds  and smells. Real stuff. Driving generates memories of your dashboard and  your windshield and your rear-view mirror and that irritating grinding  metallic noise somewhere under the hood that you are praying isn't going to  be as expensive as it sounds. Warning! Warning! Warning! Warning! Warning!If your idea of a great vacation is shopping at a mall (or, shudder,  an outlet mall) and eating at national chain restaurants, you have just  wasted your money on this book. Now would be a good time to return to the  independent bookseller where you bought it and politely ask for a refund.  Yes, Virginia, Asheville has a mall and a lot of chain restaurants and if  you need a guide  book to find them you are in a kind of trouble that we  are not qualified to address.Look under "Counselors" in the Yellow Pages.We are not going to direct you to national chain anything. We have  mentioned tiny regional chain somethings if we decided they are unique  enough to warrant it. The only exception to this rule is a local  health-food grocery chain that has become a big player in its field. But we  both remember when it lived in a tiny, funky storefront downtown and we  share a little (unwarranted) pride in its success.