I just finished up a relaxing few days hiking and enjoying the Asheville area. It was the first vacation with the kid along, marking another milestone we can check off the list.
We hiked Mount Pisgah and Mount Mitchell, though only the shorter trails (no more than 2 miles, though we wound up hiking much more than that). More detail on the trip can be found on Hallie’s page.
I didn’t have enought time to fully check out the wireless scene in Asheville like I’d hoped. The main, uh, stumbling block (thank you! I’ll be here all week!) is that the network drivers for my wireless card in my Zaurus aren’t equipped yet to do sniffing. The drivers I found for my Socket low-power wifi card won’t compile cleanly on my ARM cross-compiler. I didn’t have time to fix this in the past few weeks but may revisit it soon since wardriving is soooo 1337.
The cabin we stayed in was on top of a 2,000 ft hill in Fairview, NC. The cabin not only had no Internet access (gasp!), it also had an incredibly bad telephone line; one that made dialup access impossible. Still, I couldn’t help but see all the SLCs alongside the road and wonder if DSL was available. I also wondered just how far up the mountain an 802.11b signal could travel, bringing high-speed access to the wilderness.
On our Saturday climb up Mount Pisgah, I was one of the few hikers who was more interested in the radio tower behind me than the breathtaking view in front of me. Yeah, yeah. I’m a hardcore geek. But at least I had my with me and got in a long-range QSO.
Asheville also has the distinction of being the first place I’ve ever seen a real-live Segway. A bearded, pony-tailed guy in a tie-died T-shirt (ok, that described half the men in Western North Carolina) was standing on one on Battery Park Avenue while talking to the Asheville police. The police had just finished taking a police report when the guy rolled up to them. Like nearly everyone else who sees a Segway, the cops were grinning at the guy and asking him all kinds of questions about how to ride one. I imagine car owners must have gotten the same attention back when horseless carriages were just taking off.
Tomorrow I start my new job, so I’ll wrap things up. After being so lassiez-faire with my time the past few weeks, it will be strange having to live by the clock again. Strange, perhaps, but wonderfully welcome, too.