When my wife and I were planning our wedding back in 1985, she found an ad in the back of a bride magazine advertising a place with honeymoon cabins in the mountains of North Carolina. This was the place we decided to spend our honeymoon. The place was called Mountain Brook and they had a several cabins in a compound in Sylva, North Carolina. At the time, they only rented to honeymooners. Each cabin had a living room, kitchen, and bedroom. There were no televisions in the cabins. They had a separate building that you could schedule to use that had a steam room and hot tub. The living room had a fireplace and they had wood for you to burn. They also provided charcoal for the grills at each cabin. There were also trails through the woods around the site for hiking. We were close enough to take daytrips into the Smokies and Gatlinburg. The cabins also provided plenty of privacy. We enjoyed our stay at Mountain Brook.
When we arrived there, they had a basket of goodies for each newlywed couple. It had food and wine. It also had a good-luck penny in a little net bag with a tag on it telling where it came from. This penny is one of the first things we put in our printer’s drawer.
In 2015, I thought we needed to take a trip for our 30th anniversary. Among the ideas was the possibility of returning to Mountain Brook. I couldn’t remember the name of the place or the exact location, so I looked at the tag on the penny in the printer’s drawer. I did a search on the internet and found that they were still open. They had opened up their business to all vacationers, not just newlyweds. When I presented this as a possible destination for our anniversary trip, Andrea thought this was the best idea. We returned to Mountain Brook 30 years later. We were unable to stay in the same cabin from our original trip, but we stayed in the identical one next door. The steam room and hot tub building was closed, but most everything else was the same. There was a big home on the property that they had opened as a clubhouse with televisions, board games and the only Wi-Fi on site. There were several families with kids staying there during this trip.
When we left, I found a Facebook page they had established and continued to follow them. A couple of years after our trip, they changed their business and converted their rental cabins to retirement homes. Their Facebook presence is now completely gone. I couldn’t find anything else about this place on the internet except for the satellite view of the property on Google maps. I’m happy that we were able to return before they closed shop.
