Asheville, North Carolina.

In our travels, we have learned that things don’t always go as expected. I’ve told some of those stories in these pages before. We stayed for ten days in Asheville in January, and toward the end of our stay, we planned to travel the Blue Ridge Parkway. In anticipation of the road trip, I visited the Viator website to see what might be available for touring the parkway. We discovered a self-guided tour downloaded to a smartphone that uses geolocation to narrate an audio description that plays automatically according to the phone’s GPS location. The tour has no expiration date, so it can be used multiple times or to drive different parkway sections at various times. For $24.99, I thought it would be a worthwhile expense. As one might expect for such a low cost, it doesn’t include any tickets for venues that might be seen along the way or for any associated fees.

I downloaded the app before leaving the hotel to ensure a solid Internet connection as we didn’t know whether Internet access would be reliable. Once the app is downloaded, the tour maps are available to download and use. We selected the drive to Cherokee from the Asheville Blue Ridge Parkway Visitor Center. Using Google Maps, we inserted the address of the visitor center into the GPS and headed there.

Upon arrival at the visitor center, we looked at the exhibits in the building and then asked about fees to drive the parkway. At the main desk, we were advised that there is no fee, but to be sure and talk to one of the guides at a different station in the center. We took a few steps across the floor to that desk and asked for details about entering the parkway. What we were told was disappointing. The parkway was closed due to adverse conditions and winter weather. We wouldn’t be going on our scenic drive after all.

The tour company soon emailed us to ask how our scenic drive went and how we liked using the app. I wrote that we could not begin the tour due to the parkway closure and that we likely wouldn’t be returning to Asheville for at least a year. I was surprised by the response from the tour company. I replied that we’d be heading for Arizona in a few days. Because we could not use the self-guided tour we bought, the tour guide operator offered us their entire library of self-guided audio tours for Arizona at no additional cost. In a future post, I will feature one of those tours. Here is the information about the Blue Ridge Parkway tour from the Viator website.

The Asheville Visitor Center provides some displays about the parkway’s history, and guides from the National Park Service are available to answer questions about your potential journeys on the parkway. The parkway is a national park, but unlike most parks, access to the parkway is fee-free year-round. No entrance fee or pass is required. You can learn more about the parkway here, including the operating hours of the visitor centers along the 469-mile (755 km) highway.

About the photo: After parking our car, we approached the center, and I paused to capture a photo of the main entrance. It was a beautiful day, and we left the building feeling much less upbeat than when we entered it. The image was captured on my Samsung S23U and processed with Adobe Lightroom Classic and Luminar Neo. In the interest of responsible journalism, I used Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill to remove a large trash receptacle in the lower left corner of the photo.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s also acceptable. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner