adventures in Boone

A couple of weeks ago, we ran into one of Kenny’s college friends who invited us to Lenoir for a birthday gathering this past Saturday night. We definitely wanted to go, but couldn’t justify driving over an hour one way to attend a party, and kind of wanted to make a day trip out of it. So we decided to go to Boone.

For those of you who don’t know, my husband graduated from Appalachian State University nine years ago. Boone is about an hour and a half drive away from Asheville, depending on traffic, and there are a couple of different routes you can take to the town. We decided to let the Garmin lead the way, and it took us wayyyy out of the way, but it was probably faster than our normal route.

We drove through Avery County, which is widely known for it’s Christmas tree farms, and I shot a few photos from the car:

When we finally arrived at ASU, we decided to have lunch before checking out the ever-changing campus. We always eat at Macadoo’s. And we always hit up the university stores on the main street through Boone. (This time, we picked up a new license tag for Kenny’s car – he still had the dealer’s tag on the front of his car, and I wanted him to have something nicer.)

And pictures of the campus:

Oh, and some guy is missing his underwear:

I felt like we hiked around the campus…and we kind of did. I did mention a few times that it would be hard for students to gain the “Freshman 15” if they walked to classes and skipped the buses that take them to the front doors of the dorms. Really. My legs hurt after that hike.

After the Boone trip, we drove down to Blowing Rock to hit up the Tanger Outlet stores. (Did you know that the outlets usually have GREAT sales over holiday weekends? For real. Banana Republic was 40% off of EVERYTHING.)

We then grabbed dinner in Blowing Rock, which is tourist-central. And we were under-dressed for a lot of the restaurants, so we settled on dinner at a pub in the small town. On our way down the mountain, we made one more stop at a restaurant to shoot these pictures. Awesome view.

Finally, we were back on the road (with Garmin leading the way) until we got to Lenoir. We changed clothes at Wal-Mart (high class, I know) and quickly found our way to Andy and Heather’s house.

I never realized how weird Asheville was until I was at a party with people not from Asheville. It’s good to get out of town once in a while. Every trip makes me realize how much I love the city I live in (not that I hated Lenoir or the people there. I just think that Asheville has a good balance of weirdness.) We finally left at 11:30 and made it home at 1 a.m. I was exhausted, and thankful we had a three-day weekend so I could really relax…