Our first full day in Asheville. We decided to have breakfast at the hotel, just because it was easy. It was pretty average – I mean, it was fine, but I don’t think we will go there again. Everyone gets one chance.

We went out to explore downtown Asheville today. Our first stop was nearby Citizen Vinyl – a record shop/cafe/vinyl pressing plant/recording studio housed in the old Citizen Times newspaper building.

As soon as we walked in we didn’t want to leave. Great place! Awesome music played on a turntable (no Spotify playlists here) and a great selection of new and used vinyl. Even though we’d had a coffee with our breakfast, we decided to have another. We upstairs which has a very cool overlook to the whole place. Coffee was good too.

It was about then that I remembered you could tour the facility and that I had planned to pre book the tickets (they are free) but with all this holiday-ing I totally forgot. So I looked at their website and was disappointed to see that all the tours for the next 2 days were booked up 😭 I was super keen to do this tour so I asked a lady at the counter downstairs if they have a standby list or similar but she wasn’t sure. Then I noticed an email address so I sent off a quick email and told them my sob story. And we headed off in to the Asheville streets to explore some more.

We honestly didn’t get very far – stopped in a shop that just sold hundreds of different types of soda and an awesome shop full of wild and wacky things called Madam Clutterbucket’s.

Whilst we were in Madam Clutterbucks, I checked my email and I had received a reply re the Citizen Vinyl tour. It said to go there at 12 and if there are any no shows we should be able to get on the 12:30 tour.

So that is precisely what we did, and guess what? We managed to get on the tour. Hurrah! And guess what else? It was excellent. We got to hear about the history of the building, plus see the recording studio and the vinyl pressing plant. Really cool. Highly recommend if you’re ever in the area.

After the tour, it was lunch time – we didn’t really know where to go, it’s always hard when you are in a new town. There’s loads of food options here – it all looks good but a lot of it is heavy and involves bread. Oh well, what can you do? We went to Tupelo Honey and Steve had chicken and waffles and I got a Strawberry and Spinach salad because I am severely lacking in those kind of foods at the moment.

Whilst we were having lunch the obligatory afternoon storms set in – it was bucketing with rain and also thunder and lightning. We stayed in there until it had mostly passed, before making a dash to the Moog Museum or Moogseum as it is called. Yes, there is a museum here dedicated to the Moog Synthesiser. And yes, we had to go and check it out.

It’s a small museum (no photos inside) but it’s packed with information and keyboards that you can play with. Also had a theremin that you can *try* to play (note: it’s a LOT harder than it looks) Really awesome museum, we were in there quite a while.

We had a look at a few more shops after the Moogseum. While we were in one cool like arty shop we noticed that there had been a bit craft fair type thing on over the weekend – and it was finishing in just over an hour! So we raced up to the venue that it was at and got there with an hour to see the whole thing. It was huge – so many vendors with so much great high quality stuff. Steve made friends with half of the vendors. He got lots of compliments on his Daniel Johnstone “hi how are you” hat. And someone said to me “I love your outfit” We love Asheville! The place where we are cool too!!!!

Unfortunately I didn’t really take any photos – so you will have to imagine what it was like.

We went back to Madame Clutterbucks after that and I bought a hat., although we did want to buy everything in there.

It was creeping towards dinner time by now, but we weren’t really that hungry and we were quite tired, so we decided a trip to Whole Foods was the right thing to do – get some stuff for dinner and breakfast. It was a bit of a trek to get there, but we did stumble across the Moog factory/shop (you can visit it but it was closed when we went past)

Back to the hotel for room dinner – which was quite good. And that was about it for today!