I took me a little tour of hillbilly country this week. First up was a client in West Jefferson, NC, where the dominant industry is Christmas tree farming. That made for an interesting landscape, actually — it’s really pretty country up there, with scattered lots of pine trees growing in neat rows on the hillsides. It must be beautiful up there when the snow falls. I also saw quite the unique sight while I was up there: at the side of the road, framed by tree-covered mountains on all sides, hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, parked on a wooden frame with no trailer in sight, was a 25-foot sailboat with a For Sale sign propped against it. Wacky.

Of course I didn’t get any pictures of any of that. But I did get pictures at my hotel in nearby Boone, NC.

Following North Carolina, I was set to work with some clients in Kentucky, but they cancelled, so I got to come home early. I still had to go to Kentucky, though, because it was cheaper to go home early from there than from North Carolina, so I flew to Louisville and spent the night in a complete dump of a hotel — it was so bad that the cab driver warned me to “Watch yourself’ on the ride over from the airport. Nice. I stayed here for about five hours, then caught the first flight out for Los Angeles at 6:40 a.m. — and then went into the office until about 4:00, which made for a roughly 18 hour day. Nice.

Here’s the room:

And here’s the view:

Trust me when I tell you that there’s a high likelihood that hookers and drug dealers are somewhere in the background — in both pictures.