A day at the zoo

Despite the heat and my sweaty t-shirt, I had a great time at the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro while visiting Asheville a couple weeks ago. Since I was a kid, it has grown dramatically, and it seems bigger even though I’m three feet taller now. Thank Mother Nature for foliage! They lined the pathways with it and created abundant shade that made me smile.

My cherry Icee (that I was thrilled to discover) sadly was reduced to condensation and juice in the sun while I watched bison heave violently in the warmth. I was afraid they would pass out but have no fear!

There was a giraffe eating from a treetop. With his (or her) wobbly, long neck, I couldn’t help but fall in love. I kept thinking about how horrible it would be if a giraffe was afraid of heights. Scary.

While my family and I were looking at all the plants, one of the most endearing things happened. An employee stopped and told us about how chocolate comes from a tree and how tall certain plants (that I can’t recall right now. hey, it was vacation!) grow. She was super nice, and it was great.

My family and I enjoyed ourselves, and i think it’s a fun place for tiny tots. They danced around and screamed with excitement even when the animal slept. One little girl sang happy birthday to the fish as she stood beside the tank and waved her arms around. “Happy Birthday to the FFIIISSSHHHH!” It made my day. My favorite moment was when I made a friend—an energetic turtle. I named him Mr. Turtle, and I’m sure we’ll be friends for life.

Go visit!

Ross rules the roost at private clubs in Asheville

Asheville is a hot property, the locus of baby-boomers moving south and septuagenarians from Florida moving north, fed up with summer heat, increasing insurance costs and the threat of devastating hurricanes. For golfers among them, Asheville offers a wide range of daily fee courses and a choice number of golf communities, including the exclusive Cliffs at Walnut Cove and Champion Hills in nearby Hendersonville. Initiation fees at those community clubs run as high as six figures. You love golf, but maybe not quite that much.

Asheville’s choices of private golf clubs not located in communities are limited to just three, but they are of the highest quality. All three courses bear the legendary stamp of Donald Ross, the famed Scottish born architect who was drawn to the area in the 1920s. You will have to make good friends with club members to get admitted to two of them, but according to those who have played the courses, the effort will pay off in great golf and pampered service.

The Country Club of Asheville

Country Club of Asheville, located just a few miles north of the city, opened for play in 1928 although the club was formed in 1898. From the back tees, the Donald Ross layout plays to 6,676 yards with a rating of 72.2 and slope of 133, which translates to a fair challenge, if not a pushover. (Note: Some web sites indicate a rating of just 71.4 and slope of just 120.) This course features modest changes in elevation with some tees perched above the fairways and uphill approaches to the greens. The club has a full-service tennis program, with eight clay courts and two new indoor courts. The modern fitness center comes along with a trainer. Current full-family membership, which includes golf, tennis, pool, the fitness center and access to the dining facilities, is $25,000 (non-reimbursable), with dues of $375 per month and required food purchases of $195 per quarter. A $300 “stock purchase” provides the member with full voting rights and is refundable at resignation from the club. There is no waiting list currently to join the club. For more information, contact Membership Manager Debbie Ponder at 828-258-9183 (ext. 13).

Hendersonville Country Club

Hendersonville Country Club’s history has been marked by stops and starts, but for the last 60 years, the private club has been full steam ahead. Donald Ross designed the layout in the late 1920s but during the Depression, construction was halted. It resumed as a public works project in the mid 1930s, was taken over by the city of Hendersonville, sold to the local Rotary Club and then sold back to the city. In 1945, club members purchased the club, which is located just southwest of the city of Hendersonville. Today, the course plays to 6,550 yards from the back tees with a par of 70. The course rating is 69 and the slope rating 125. Full family membership for Henderson County residents is $20,000 with dues of just $1,900 per year; a member with whom you are friendly, as opposed to a business contact (like your real estate agent) must nominate you for consideration. The annual required purchase of $200 in food is low compared with many other private clubs. Hendersonville counts residents of the nearby Champion Hills community among its own membership. For more information, contact General Manager Anthony Chelena at (828) 692-2261, (ext. 11).

Biltmore Forest Country Club

Biltmore Forest rounds out the trifecta of Donald Ross courses in the Asheville area. Opened in 1925, the course features 27 bunkers, seven well-placed water hazards and the impressive views you expect to find in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The quality of the course was good enough to have hosted the Women’s Amateur Championship in 1999.

The Biltmore name, of course, is associated with one of the wealthiest families to ever walk American soil, the Vanderbilts, and it was Mrs. George Vanderbilt who conceived Biltmore Forest to approximate her husband’s adjacent Biltmore Estate as a place to live for “persons of means”. The result was one of the country’s first, and certainly premier, residential developments. Today, it is not easy to find a home for sale in the enclave for under $2 million…when they are for sale.

Like most Ross designed courses, Biltmore Forest is not long, just 6,600 yards from the back tees. The fairways are tree-lined and the greens are reputed to be fast. The rating of 72.2 and slope of 135 translate into a significant challenge for those well schooled in the game of golf, as well as well-heeled in the game of life. Becoming a member may be the biggest challenge of all; it “could take years,” according to the club’s general manager, for a newcomer to the area to make enough good contacts within the club to be considered for membership. However, a local real estate agent says it helps to buy a home in Biltmore Forest, get to know your neighbors who are members, and then wait out the process of being proposed, seconded and then supported by letters from six other members. The minimum wait time is six-months, she indicated. The club guards its initiation fees and dues charges like a state secret; an employee at another area club told us “they charge whatever they feel like at the time.” Biltmore Forest’s main number is (828) 274-1261.

Larry Gavrich is the founder of HomeOnTheCourse LLC, an advisory service for people considering purchase of real estate in a golf community or membership in a private club; and the editor of the online GolfCommunityReviews.com, where he provides objective, unbiased reviews of golf courses and communities and observations about golf and real estate.

High-minded: Developers set lofty standards at Mountain Air

Unique airstrip grounds pilots (happily) in mountain community

Mountain Air is just 45 minutes from Asheville, NC, but about as private as a golf community gets. Sure, many communities are cloistered behind imposingly high gates, but how many of those communities are nearly 5,000 feet high, a good 15-minute winding drive up from a state road, and with a landing strip at the top of the mountain?

Mountain Air, located near the town of Burnsville, is different in a number of ways. Not only does its 2,900-foot runway span the entire mountaintop, but it also cuts right through the dramatic Scott Pool designed 18-hole golf course. During my round there, I was stopped for 10 minutes by flashing red lights warning of an impending takeoff, adding to the “drama” of a round that was played, at times, on the edge of a cliff.
During the summer, the landing strip is in frequent use, especially on Fridays when the weekenders arrive. To the non-pilot golfer considering a home at Mountain Air, the random stoppage in play and distractions of airplane engines are worth considering. For pilots, the community is about as close to heaven as they can get, and fully 20 percent of Mountain Air’s residents are experienced in a cockpit.

Mountain Air’s charms lie in such idiosyncrasies. The brainchild of two local families whose interest was in preserving and sharing much of Slickrock Mountain’s environment, the community retains a naturalist –- titled director of natural resources — who guides members and their children on nature walks up and down the wooded mountainside. Despite the construction of homes in the last decade, the mountain is still largely undisturbed and a haven for wild turkeys, black bears, mountain lions and other wildlife.

The community also retains an outpost specialist (translated as retailer of outdoor gear), a controlled access coordinator (read security manager), head organic gardener and executive chef (who no doubt work closely together). Mitchell Banks, from one of the families that developed Mountain Air, retains the title president and director of the mountain experience. Okay, whatever.

The design of the golf course, the placement of homes and the clubhouse at Mountain Air all are designed to maximize the incredible views across the Blue Ridge Mountains. The rustic, open-air dining facility looks out across Western North Carolina to Tennessee 20 miles away. The dining area, as well as the more formal clubhouse next door, hangs over the side of the hill overlooking the airstrip. How often can you chomp on a burger, sip a beer and watch a plane land just below? Pretty cool.

The space gobbled up by the landing strip, which can accommodate only small planes, has forced one significant compromise; the practice range for the golf course is a good mile away from the clubhouse and first tee, requiring either a short car ride or an ambitious cart ride. The tees at the range are elevated, but about 20 yards out and below is the metal roof of the combination equipment shed and indoor driving bays for use in inclement weather; top your ball off the practice tee, and you won’t be the only one who notices when it clangs off the roof.

The golf course’s winding, twisting layout spurs a lot of discussion in the Asheville area. Either people love it for its views, its dramatic shots from five-story-high tees, its generous fairways and the distance assist you get on drives in the thinner air; or they hate it for the visual interruption of the airstrip and what some describe as a “tricked-up” routing. This is not by any means a classic golf course, to be sure, but it is typically in excellent condition and memorable not only for the airstrip –- and the potential for a hooked drive rolling 800 yards down the runway –- but also for the few holes that seem from another planet. I hit my 160-yard club, a six iron, on the severely downhill 225-yard par three 10th hole, probably the only long par 3 east of the Rocky Mountains where that is possible. It will be interesting to see what tricks designer Pool has in store for the nine holes the owners have asked him to add by next spring.

The 1,300-acre Mountain Air is almost entirely a second-home community, and real estate prices, though beginning in the mid-$200s for single bedroom condos, are at the high-end of other mountain communities in western North Carolina. Its residents include a high percentage of current and former CEOS, as well as the well-pensioned pilots. Director of Sales Ken Maxwell is especially excited about a small new neighborhood called Spring Rock which will feature just six homes, all 4 bedroom, 3 ½ baths and about 3,400 square feet. They will look out over the new nine-hole course and to the western mountains beyond. Prices for Spring Rock will range from about $1.5 to $1.75 million. With not quite two thirds of Mountain Air’s properties sold to date, there are still plenty of home sites available at prices appropriate to their size and views.

Only 10 percent of Mountain Air’s members live in the community year round, although the golf course, clubhouse, nature center and other activities remain open. It is cold at the summit during the winter months, although the thermometer reaches into the 50s occasionally. The community maintains its own road crew and road-clearing equipment and, according to Maxwell, Mountain Air’s roads are cleaned before the county’s are. Although Mountain Air’s warm, rustic clubhouse will typically close by 2 p.m. during the winter months, it will remain open for dinner if just one of the 30 or so intrepid couples who stick around for the winter calls for a dinner reservation.

Mountain Air is not for people looking for a true year-round community, although the managers of the property make accommodations for winter residents. Those who want to be within, say, 30 minutes of a city, may also feel a little isolated at Mountain Air. Although the front gate of the community is just a half hour from Asheville, those living in the loftiest regions of Mountain Air can count on another 10 minutes drive up the mountain. But for a strong sense of privacy, a load-up of amenities, amazing mountain views from home and golf course and the convenience for resident pilots to fly-in for the weekend, Mountain Air is the high life.

Larry Gavrich is the founder of HomeOnTheCourse LLC, an advisory service for people considering purchase of real estate in a golf community or membership in a private club; and the editor of the online GolfCommunityReviews.com, where he provides objective, unbiased reviews of golf courses and communities and observations about golf and real estate.

Laziness and the environment

The bright green blog has a great post on the benefits of personal laziness and the environment.

Here are a few excerpts (links added) -

Every day I come across lots of advice on how to be more green. Start your own vegetable garden. Build a compost bin. Insulate your home. Brew biodiesel in your back yard. Go out in the middle of the night and paint bike lanes on the street.

And every time I see these tips, I ask myself, “Who the heck has the time for that?”

And then I think about all the ungreen things I do, like buying a book on Amazon even though I live a three-minute walk from a bookstore. Or ordering overpackaged takeout instead of cooking my own food. Flying instead of taking a train. Driving instead of walking.

—

I see the spark of a new labor movement here (slogan: Workers of the world, unwind!). What would happen we made a coordinated effort to slack off just a little bit – in an effort to save the planet, of course? Would our businesses collapse? Would America become a Third World nation?

Or would we find that we’re able to get by just fine? Maybe we’d have less stuff, but more time to enjoy the company of our friends and families. More time to pursue hobbies and exercise. More time to spend on being a citizen, not producer or a consumer. Would that be so bad?

-Eoin O’Carroll

Go ahead and read the full post “Go green by being lazy“. You’ve got the time. Be lazy…for the environment of course.