I love lakes, no sharks and no alligators unless you’re in Florida. One of our favorite lakes is Lake Lure! It’s in North Carolina in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, so a pretty short drive for us in Tennessee. It sits in the Hickory Nut Gorge and you can see the majestic Chimney Rock Mountain. It’s a pretty twisty drive for fellow car sick companions, but the views are beautiful. It’s only about thirty minutes from Asheville, so you are near some of the best food and eclectic shops ever. And if you didn’t already know, Lake Lure is where they filmed the movie Dirty Dancing. I love the movie, but definitely not kid friendly so my kids have no idea what the reference is to. They apparently have a Dirty Dancing festival in the area that we haven’t checked out. There is an admission fee to get in to the beach area, but it’s pretty nominal. Make sure you look up opening day before you plan your trip as well. If you’re kids are like mine you’ll be set with a few simple toys for the sand and water. I recommend this bucket set because it’s PVC, BPA and Pthalate free. Hape makes it and that’s generally a good brand. My three year old loves a good dump truck to drive on just about any surface, this one from Greentoys is the perfect set for the beach. My younger kids still wear the puddle jumpers and have done well with those. There are lifeguards, but I have my younger kids wear a life jacket. It’s a lake.
Now for the beach area itself, it is huge! There is a splash pad area and a couple of water slides. There is however no shade really so I’d definitely bring an umbrella or a pop up tent. Unlike the one I bought, this tent has a back vent which should give you better airflow than mine. There is no way we could have brought our baby out there without the tent. A portable fan would be excellent to bring as well. For sun protection i’ve been getting my kids rash guards. It’s a new concept to me to not slather my kids in probably toxic sunscreen but to rather put rash guards on them. I got our baby a one piece long sleeve zip up one from Primary and the older kids just have short sleeve tops. Their bottoms run a little big, at least for my daughter so i’d size down on those but I always get tops a little bigger for growing room. Their pieces are oeko-tex certified, have no tacky characters and are less expensive than other brands I tend to like. I also love their sun hats, i’ve been pretty big on sun protection lately. My order didn’t come in time for this trip, but we’ve used them since and love them. And we do still use sunscreen, at least we try. My husband hates it but he does in fact burn like every other human. I look for one that has non-nano zinc oxide as the base, like this Badger sunscreen. I’ve used tons of Badger products over the years and am always impressed. Ok last tip, you can bring food and drinks into the beach area. So we definitely do that to save money and because we don’t like eating concession stand food.
There are some places to stay in the actual town, but we haven’t checked those out. For the past two years we’ve booked a house off of VRBO with some of our friends. This past year we stayed in Gerton, NC. It’s in between Lake Lure and Asheville, which made it a little quicker on our drive out. I don’t want to bore you but we usually stop at Carrier Park in Asheville to let the kids get all their energy out. It’s a wooden playground, those are my kids favorite! And some of our favorite places to eat have been White Labs Kitchen & Tap (sourdough pizza), Sunny Point, Farm Burger, Biscuit Head, Laughing Seed, Milk and Honey (oh my truffles!) and the Hop ice-cream. There are so many more places we want to try but those i’ve been to and they pass my test of delicious and kid friendly. I’d LOVE to hear your favorite places to dine in Asheville! A couple taco joints are calling my name.
*Bold texts are links, feel free to check them out for my recommendations. Thanks for supporting my blog 🙂