A Great Birthday Weekend!

Look!  My new watch is telling me it's time to eat cake!  Yay!  :)

I had a great birthday weekend!  My birthday celebrating started on Friday night with a trip to Plant in Asheville.  I think it might be the most amazing restaurant I have ever eaten at!  I've been to some great vegan places, but Plant is just outstanding! 

I also got to open one of my birthday presents.....R got me a subscription (kind of as a joke) to Gothic Beauty magazine.  I don't really know much about "Goth culture" and I think that's why I LOVE this magazine.  R and I have this Barnes and Noble competition going.....everytime we go we have to try and find the most unusual/unique/obscure magazine that we can.  R found Gothic Beauty last year when we were in Atlanta and I found "Pole Fitness" this year.  Those are the top two we have found!  I read the issue of Gothic Beauty from cover to cover that night at Barnes and Noble last year.  Now I know how to make black roses on a budget....SCORE!  :) 

My actual birthday day was full of more surprises!  I got to open my "real" present....R got me a new Polar HRM since my last one broke.  We have a membership to REI now so if anything goes wrong with it, we can take the watch back without any problems.  It was great to be able to keep track of my calories burned while hiking this weekend. 

Steps to Mingo Falls....lots and lots of steps!

That leads to the next surprise......waterfall hiking in the Smoky Mountains National Park!  I love the Smokies and now that we are in Asheville, we are just about an hour away from the Cherokee side of the Smokies. 

Mingo Falls

I knew after my 30th birthday last year, that I wanted to incorporate health and fitness into my birthday celebrating.  It's a goal of mine that I try to get healthier each year I get older.  I know I was healthier at 30 than I was at 29 and I am healthier at 31 than I was at 30.  So naturally, I wanted my birthday to be full of hiking and nature. 

Smoky Mountains National Park trail

Indian Creek Falls-Smoky Mountains National Park

We also did some exploring around the town of Cherokee, NC.  My blog isn't really the platform for political and social debates, but I do have to say that I was very frustrated by the conditions that the Native American people of Cherokee live in.  I am from Oklahoma and I am not going to say things are perfect for Native American people there (far from it) but I feel like there's more of respect for Native culture in Oklahoma.  It just felt like the Native people of Cherokee were a spectacle to tourists....not cool, in my opinion. 

Anyway, we did some exploring around the town and I did see this awesome retro hotel sign.  I love old retro signs and I love taking pictures of them with my retro camera app!

Pink Motel-Cherokee, NC

The only thing about my birthday this year that was not cool was getting stung by a yellow jacket yesterday and then having an allergic reaction to it!  It was scary!  We went hiking with friends and we were almost finished hiking and back to the car when a few yellow jackets stung me and one of my friends.  He didn't have an allergic reaction, but I did on the way home.  I got blurred vision, my hearing was weird, I started seeing things that weren't really there, then my skin started itching.  Eventually I was covered in hives all over my body.  Yikes!  R bought me some benadryl and we had an epipen in the car (luckily, we never had to use it).  Today, my arm is still really swollen but luckily all of the hives went away.  It was a pretty scary experience!  I looked like one of those bumpy gourds you see at the pumpkin patch....not a pleasant feeling on my skin.  Even my scalp had the bumps all over it.  Anyway, I guess I will be carrying Benadryl and an epipen with me from now on! 

Overall though, it was an excellent birthday full of great surprises and fun!