Free Ballin’

A number of people have asked me what I thought of my week in Asheville, NC, and I have virtually nothing to say. I didn’t do Asheville. The allure of Asheville is the lifestyle and the attitude of the people who live there, and I had almost no interaction with anyone there, with two notable exceptions. I met a couchsurfer at a coffee shop he recommended, and we chatted. And I spent the week hanging out a little here and there with a new friend of mine, a guy who rents a room in the house where I was staying. But I didn’t even spend that much time with him, because I mostly just kept to myself, working. You’ll see some of that work posted here, some of it was networking, planning.

Now I’m in Charlotte, to cover the Bobcats/Hawks game, this Friday. My plans have been a little up in the air because I was holding out hope for an unlikely trip to the All-Star game (Feb 13th – 15th, in Phoenix) and wanted to be ready to drop what I was doing and hitchhike to Phoenix. But now that I’m not going, I can plan the next legs of my trip a bit more closely.

I will be in Charlotte through the 7th, maybe 8th. Then I will head up to Little Switzerland, so I can write a sample chapter of the Free Ballin’ book, to send around. Then I’ll head out to Memphis to spend a week and catch a few Grizzles games. And then I go truly west from there. I’d actually like to hit OKC on the way, to catch another game (they were the loudest, most raucous fans thus far, and that was before they won three games) and I would like to see the  memorial for the OKC bombing.  The people I met there told me it was something to see.