You might be wondering how we came to start this adventure and end up in the mountains of North Carolina. It all started about 5 years ago when we subscribed to a magazine called “Best Places to Retire”. The information they provided helped us narrow our search to the mountains of North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. See “Why North Carolina” to see what our criteria was for a place to live.
In 2004 we used a week of our time share at the end of October and stayed on a beautiful golf course in Pikens SC. We spent the week driving around to dozens and dozens of towns and that is when we first saw Hendersonville. While we loved our time share, Pikens was not our dream destination but it was a good central area for us to work from.

It is quite an interesting process to drive into towns and see what first impression they make on you. Is it a growing town or just barely surviving? What kinds of stores does it have and not have? What is the financial health of the town? What does the town value or not value? How does the town “feel”?

We read about Crossville TN and in October 2005 we scheduled time share and so we were off for a week on this beautiful plateau in the mountains. The first 5 days Crosseville seemed to have everything we wanted but then we started to discover the things that would not meet our needs. That’s another long story but here is one short little tidbit. Crosseville is in Cumberland County which is one of the largest counties in TN. It is a dry county and the nearest liquor store was 40 miles away. I had noticed even in 2003 there were not many liquor stores, unlike MN where there seems to be one in every little strip mall, but I don’t think MN has dry counties. We had allowed and extra day on our way home to look at Knoxville TN, where the airport was and liked what we saw in Knoxville so decided to revisit.

March 2006 we scheduled two weeks of time share to look much more closely at Knoxville TN and Hendersonville/Asheville NC. Unfortunately the time shares were each about an hours drive from our actual destination so we had a lot of travel time that wasn’t very productive. By the way the time share at Lake Lure is gorgeous.

We really wanted to love Knoxville TN because of the low cost of living but it was just not what we wanted. It is only 80 miles from Knoxville to Hendrsonville and still the same mountain ranges but different. We liked Hendersonville area as much as we thought we would but were having a hard time finding communities that were what we wanted until our last day there and we found at least half a dozen different areas that looked like it had the homes and lots we were looking for. Of course, by then we were out of time but knew we would have to return for a really close look and that brings us to October 2006.