I haven't been very organised with this blog so am yet to write a post about the first few weeks here but hopefully I will get round to that some point soon. Anyway, today was Labour day and this meant a 3 day weekend so three of us from warwick decided to venture off into North Carolina and spent a few days in the mountain town of Asheville!

Getting to Asheville was my first experience aboard an infamous greyhound bus and it did not fail to impress. Having almost acquired heatstroke walking to the greyhound station we picked up our tickets and began to wait until our bus arrived. Looking round the decidedly dodgy station, I couldn't help but notice a large number of weird net bags placed on random chairs. They were like fishing nets with various objects in; usually some letters and some clothing. There was also an absolute abundance of slightly rough looking men in blue shirts and beige trousers. After pondering the situation for a while I concluded that 1) the men were bus drivers and there was just a lot of buses that day and 2) net bags were all the fashion in South Carolina. Feeling glad to have worked out these mysteries I told Helly, rather loudly, about what (I assumed) was going on. It wasn't until I was boarding the bus, along with about 25 of the blue shirt men that someone in front of me mentioned the words 'release day' and the penny dropped. Not bus drivers at all but freshly freed prisoners! What fun. And so our four-hour journey was spent on a coach with a convict-citizen ratio of about 5 to 1. Good times.

Anyway Asheville itself was really good and I would definitely recommend it if you are in the area. The town is nestled at the foot of the blue ridge mountains and has a completely different feel to Columbia even though its only around 3 hours drive away. It's a pretty hippie town with lots of kooky gift and clothes shops and some amaaaaazing places for food. We got to experience our first 'biscuit' which does not look like this....

But in fact like this!

Which may seem a bit underwhelming for such a popular food thing of the south but once you get some blueberry jam on it, it is actually lush. Though still not quite a hobnob.

We spent the first day wandering around downtown including spending an inordinate amount of time in urban outfitters (but it was nice to have some familiarity!) and on the second day were kindly given a lift by some other people staying at the hostel up into the blue ridge mountains. 

We walked up the 'Craggy Gardens' trail.

This was amazing and the views were insane. The photos don't do it justice...

The blue ridge parkway is pretty famous round here (and I think in North America in general) for being a really scenic drive and we saw tonnes of motorcyclists and also lots of mental cyclists - the inclines were massive. As well as the road itself, there's trails everywhere and we spent a few hours surrounded by bees and butterflies hiking through the woods which was a nice change to the traffic and humidity of Columbia.

Asheville is a pretty cool town and prides itself on being the beer capital of North America. There are breweries everywhere, lots of good places to eat, and lots of cool murals on many of the street corners.

There was also a lot of street musicians around the town, including this absolute ledge of a spoon player...

After three nights in our hostel (it had a dream diary for guests to write in and a paper mâché giraffe as the centre piece of the lounge, so not sure we quite qualified as alternative enough to stay there but hey ho) we said goodbye to Asheville (for now) and boarded the greyhound home (no felons this time).

xxxxxxxxxx