I was a little behind in getting this started, so for post #2 today we're just gonna play a little catch-up. After we left Mount Greylock, we booked it into the Appalachian Mountains, because we'd been there a number of times so in order to make the most of out trip, we didn't really think it was necessary to stop.
Our GPS was having us get on and off of highways and was constantly losing service, so instead of following it and potentially getting lost, we decided to just pick one of the backroads we saw on a map that looked like it was going straight south towards Atlanta and stick with it until we got some service again. That weaved us in and around a lot of mountains, the last of which had a wooden sign pointing left that said "Sky Valley, the highest point in Georgia". Naturally, we had to follow it.
... and it was SO worth it. There was a little town at the top of the mountain, but this was by far the best view. We hiked around the top, and got a little lost (this was apparently the theme of the day), so we came down a totally different way and ended up in a town called Alto, Georgia.
At the edge of the town, before I even knew where we were it had occurred to me that I had internet friends somewhere in North Georgia and they'd kept telling me about this "bus graveyard" that I needed to go to, but I didn't know anything about it. In maybe the weirdest coincidence of my life, I looked up and saw a giant hill with a spray painted school bus on top it it, and for some reason I kind of knew that that was it. After a lot of convincing I got Shawn to pull over and we climbed up the hill.
Because of this sign, we figured this was a thing that people did often, so we were super respectful and didn't do anything crazy. And it was SO COOL. There were probably almost a hundred - no exaggeration, a HUNDRED - totally destroyed and spray painted school buses and classic cars. They were in PILES, and sometimes there were cars stacked on busses stacked on cars. It was incredible.
After about a half an hour we were about to head out but we heard some kind of alarm going off and then the sound of an old man yelling. Long story short, he had a gun it was literally a case of "get off my lawn er I'll shoot ya" in such a heavy southern accent you could barely understand him. He started yelling about how we were idiots because we didn't realize it was trespassing, and I told him we thought it was abandoned (which was honestly true).... and he was not very happy about it and started asking how we hadn't heard about him in the newspaper(?!)
... This also seemed to let up when we told him where we were from and he saw the license plate on my car, he seemed to chock it up to us being "stupid Yankees" and let us go. But needless to say I would 10/10 probably do this again
