Karen and Bill

We're Karen and Bill. We bought the townhouse a few years ago and started hosting it on Airbnb soon after. We moved up from Florida full-time after years of family vacations to Watauga Lake had us looking at the real estate every time we drove home. The math eventually worked. We pulled the trigger. We live a few minutes from the rental.

Why this place

Watauga Lake doesn't get the press that Norris Lake or Smith Mountain do. Most of its shoreline is federally protected national forest, which means it stays uncrowded year-round, the water is unusually clear for a southern reservoir, and you can boat for an hour without passing another house. The mountains around it run higher than people from the lowland South expect. There's an entire town under one end of it from when the TVA flooded the valley in 1948.

We wanted a place that felt like a real corner of the country, not a vacation strip. This is it. We tell our guests straight when something isn't great (the driveway is steep, the cell service is patchy, the lake is not in your front yard) and what's worth the drive (Banner Elk for dinner, Carvers Gap for fall color, Captain's Table when it's open).

How we host

We answer messages within an hour during waking hours, faster than that during dinner. We don't use a property manager. The keypad code and the welcome note come from us directly. If something breaks during your stay, you message us and one of us drives over. That's the model.

Karen handles turnovers herself. She inspects every cleaning. We've had guests comment on the cleanliness in 27 of the first 27 reviews. That's not luck.

Bill writes most of what's on this site. If a page says "I" it's usually him; if it says "we" it's both of us. The voice on the Karen-authored stories (family vacation, birding) is hers.

What we're not

We're not a hotel. We don't have a front desk. We don't have a spa or a restaurant. The kitchen is in your unit and you cook in it or you don't, your call. If you want a resort experience, there are places in Asheville and Boone that do that very well and we'll recommend them.

We're also not a tourism board. Everything on this site is from our point of view as residents and hosts. We've tried to verify every fact against published sources (Wikipedia, USDA Forest Service, TVA, state parks, official business sites), and the sources are listed on each detail page. Where something is contested or unverifiable, we've hedged rather than guessed.

What we want for you

A real trip, not a transaction. You arrive, you drop the bags, you walk out onto the deck and you stop talking for a minute because the view does that to people. You boat or you don't. You hike or you don't. You drive into Banner Elk for dinner one night. You light the fire pit on the back porch. You wake up with no alarm because the lake doesn't have one.

That's the trip. See the place, read about the lake, or check available dates. If you have a question first, we'd rather hear from you than not.