Dirty Dancing was filmed there. Dirty driving got me there.

01Lived

I was driving from Goodlettsville, Tennessee, to Fayetteville, North Carolina, the best part of a nine-hour journey. This was the era of paper maps. I was no map reader at the best of times, and this was an American map, full of interstates that meant little to me. Mid-afternoon the sky went dark and heavy snow set in, so I pulled in at a small out-of-the-way store. I got chatting to the old man who ran it and told him where I was heading, and he showed me a much shorter way across. What he couldn’t know was that I had never learned to read contour lines, so I took his shortcut with no idea that it went straight over the Blue Ridge Mountains. I climbed in blizzard conditions, in a car with no heater, wearing two pairs of gloves, two jumpers and a leather jacket, and it took me forty or fifty three-point turns to get up. I was battered. Then, near the top, I broke through the weather into brilliant sunshine, and spread out below me was the most picturesque lake I have ever seen: Lake Lure, where Dirty Dancing had been filmed less than a year before. It was October, and the view was mine alone.