Off to Asheville for the Grey Eagle Tavern and Music Hall! It's about a 7 hour drive, with breaks for us and Sadie to play “stick”. Somehow we arrived in North Carlina just in time for a heat wave. It was hot and humid in Asheville, not quite what we expected at the end of April. The Grey Eagle is quite a contrast to the elegant “Art Deco” of the Spanish Ballroom. It's a very cool, very funky restaurant/bar run by two “twin cousins” from Louisiana. Their “gumbolyah” is to die for! They crammed about 100 dancers onto a plywood dance floor that gave great response on the balances. We love to hear that - the energy on the floor makes us feel very much like we've come home to Maine (just a lot warmer). Great dancers – a lot of flat-footing at the ends of the lines, which run length-wise along the stage. That's a challenge for a caller, but the band loves it. We get to see a lot more of the dancing that way. Callers Beth Molaro, Diane Silver, Barbara Groh and fiddlers Laurie Fisher and Jeff Baker all stopped in to say hello and dance a bit, in fact, Diane ended up taking us home for the night. She gets an especially big thank you from us for being available at the last minute – our original host's wife was ill, and we changed to Diane's with no notice, and without her knowing we have a dog traveling with us! Her two cats were a little miffed, but Sadie is very respectful of kitties, we did not encourage a meeting, and there were no problems. As we arrived Rodney Sutton was rehearsing the Green Grass Cloggers on the dance floor. Later in the evening he was able to steer me in to the right person to help me out with a problem I was having with my mountain dulcimer. I wasn't able to play it at the dance because of a persistent metallic buzz. Rodney and several other people referred me to the Acoustic Corner in Black Mountain. We decided to stop there en route to Winston-Salem for the Tuesday dance and see what they could do.