The Queen City & The Carolinas

Still here, still loving Charlotte so far. We are now both gainfully employed which makes it so much harder to force myself to pick up a computer in my off-time to work on the blog. Is anyone still reading this? If not, I don’t blame you, but I’m still determined to finish chronicling our adventure!

We’re both working remotely right now but eventually I’ll be working in the Duke Energy building in Uptown Charlotte (my building is the one with the ‘pizza slice’ on the top).

So now rewind to last October when we visited North Carolina for nearly a month during the sabbatical…

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Blowing Rock, NC

Bruno boy turned 4 while we were in North Carolina. To celebrate we did plenty of his favorite activity, hiking, for his birthday weekend.

Blowing Rock is a cute little town in North Carolina off of the Blue Ridge Parkway that we’ll definitely be back to enjoy more post-pandemic. Here we went to The Blowing Rock, a famous cliff overhanging the Johns River Gorge which is so named because the northwest winds sweep through the rocky walls with such a force that returns light objects back to the top of the rock.

It was a bright and windy day, but we were so high up that the ghostly clouds wove over the crevices in the fall foliage.

Also in the town of Blowing Rock, we walked the short 1-mile Bass Lake Loop Trail in Moses H Cone Memorial Park.

Bruno capped off his birthday with some special wet dog food which necessitated him to sport his man-bun to avoid getting his ears dirty.

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Great Smoky Mountains

From Blowing Rock we headed west to the Smoky Mountains. Here we hiked one of the two dog-friendly trails, the 3-mile Oconaluftee River Trail. It is a pretty flat trail which follows alongside the river.

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Land of Waterfalls – Pisgah National Forest

After leaving the mountains we knew we wanted to go to Asheville, NC, but we wanted to hit one more spot first. Just south of Asheville is the Pisgah National Forest where we stayed at the Land of Waterfalls RV Campground, which is a perfect name for the area because there are so many waterfalls very close together.

We started out on the 2.9-mile Triple Falls Trail.

That same day we went on the easy 0.9-mile Hooker Falls Trail. The Hooker Falls waterfall is short but long, just like Bruno.

After this cluster of waterfalls we traveled ~17 miles to another cluster of waterfalls. You can see so many waterfalls in this area in just a couple of days.

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Asheville, NC

In Asheville we visited a few different outdoor sights: breweries! Asheville has a huge selection of craft breweries. We celebrated fulfilling our patriotic duty of voting at Wicked Weed Brewery.

Bruno even found a fellow basset hound at Catawba Brewery. The other basset hound was about twice the size of Bruno. They spent the whole time playing so most of my pictures are just a blur of floppy ears and wiggly butts in motion.

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Charlotte, NC

We spent our first day in Charlotte walking around the city center. Charlotte has the big city feel with all of the skyscrapers but with less traffic and easy parking.

Charlotte has several city parks and we meandered the through The Green first.

Next we walked around Romare Bearden Park which is nestled between the baseball and football stadiums.

The autumn leaves were beautiful and especially scenic with the skyscrapers as backdrop.

Some Charlotte history: King George III still ruled the Colonies when European settlers chartered the town back in 1768. They named the new town after the King’s wife, Queen Charlotte, and gave the surrounding county the name Mecklenburg in honor of her birthplace in Germany. Alas, Queen Charlotte never graced the city with her presence.

Late in the Revolution, British General Cornwallis swept into town and remarked that Charlotte was a “hornet’s nest of rebellion.” Today, the hornet and hornet’s nest are popular symbols, on both police officers’ uniforms and the NBA Charlotte Hornets’ uniforms.

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Raleigh, NC

In Raleigh we went to some more parks.

For dinner we went to Wye Hill Kitchen & Brewing for Raleigh ‘city views’. While the sunset views were lovely, Raleigh just doesn’t have the city feel that Charlotte does.

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North Carolina Coast

Before leaving the state, we wanted to visit the North Carolina Coast. Through our Thousand Trails membership we were able to stay at Goose Creek Camping Resort which was one of the prettiest campgrounds we’d stayed at so far. We had lake views from our back window.

Another side of the resort had its own ocean views of Bogue Sound. We walked here every day to watch the sun set.

We spent a few days under the sun at a nearby public beach.

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Charleston, South Carolina

We decided to spend Thanksgiving 2020 in Charleston. There was a cute little family of ducks that roamed around our RV park here.

We pride ourselves on our ability to make a well-rounded Thanksgiving dinner for two in our tiny home.

Complete with pumpkin pie cheesecake for dessert.

In the city of Charleston, we went to Joe Riley Waterfront Park to see the iconic pineapple fountain.

Here we walked out on the pier for the water views and public swinging benches.

We spent the rest of our day strolling the streets of Charleston admiring the old Victorian architecture. The buildings here have a southern charm unlike any other city.

We stopped for lunch and cocktails at Poogan’s Porch. This restaurant is in a restored Victorian house originally built in 1891. It was converted to a restaurant in 1976 and named for the neighborhood dog Poogan who claimed the porch as his favorite spot to lounge on Queen Street.

The restaurant winds throughout the Victorian house, but we chose to sit on the porch where dogs are of course welcome.

Charleston is filled with old buildings, pretty churches and horse-drawn carriages. It’s the perfect place to walk about and enjoy nice weather.

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South Carolina was our last stop before we would slowly make our way back to Kansas for Christmas.

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I won’t make any empty promises about the timing of the next blog post, but I will finish it if it’s the last thing I do! If you made it all the way here, thanks for your dedication and thanks for reading!

Next stop: Chattanooga, TN