North Carolina 2012

Our same group that went to North Carolina last year decided to go back this year to see more basketball games, and because we just can't get enough of a long road trip. OK, that's not really true about the road trip but it's true about the basketball. But no matter how you slice it, it's 14 hours to get to Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill from our humble abodes. That's a fer piece from Louisiana, but six of the seven participants struck out on the morning of Wednesday, December 28 with high expectations of a great adventure. On our trip last year we drove through torrential rainstorms and it rained or was overcast the entire time we were gone. This year it was sunny and beautiful the whole trip. YAY! The first day was 12 solid hours of motoring with the typical stops as well as a stop in Atlanta to eat at a famous place called The Varsity, a burger joint that's a throwback to the 1950's. It was an experience. What we didn't know when we stopped at that particular location, it was in a very sketchy part of town and we were lucky to escape with our lives. OK, that's not really true, and we never felt in danger, until after the fact when a friend of Caitlin's, who's from Atlanta, told her we were in a bad part of town.

After we ate our burgers in the bad part of town we found some ice cream in the bad part of town and then headed off to South Carolina and our place of rest for the night. We stopped in Gastonia South Carolina where we enjoyed being immobile for about 10 hours.

The girls lounging about in one of our rooms.


And our other room.


That's Caitlin in the bed and Emma cruising the net.


Maggie brushing her teeth before going beddy bye.


Emma's tuned in to her home planet, and there's an Olivia with straight hair who looks much like Caitlin because of it.


More people getting ready for bed.


Caitlin's arm is strangely hanging in mid air.


Shhh, it's night night time.


The next morning we were up and out by mid morning......don't forget you are traveling with night owls......and we quickly made our way to a place called Bojangles, home of the boberry biscuit which happens to be a little piece of heaven in the form of a blueberry biscuit drizzled with icing. After we finished eating our boberry biscuit, we used Google maps to pinpoint any and all Bojangles between us and our destination so as to obtain more boberry biscuits as often as possible. It was an important and all around good decision.

Car people eating Boberry biscutis. See how happy it made Maggie and Olivia?


Cute peeps.


Now back to the trip. Gastonia, SC, remember we stayed the night there, isn't far from Charlotte NC, and all the car people unanimously voted to stop and have a look at the city. And we weren't disappointed.

Such cute homes!


Cute sidewalks, cute decorations, just all around cute!


We loved seeing these streets.


Lovely and enchanting.


It was fantastic!


One of the best things about road trips around Christmastime is the fact that lots of places are deserted due to the holidays. We pretty much had the place to ourselves. So we drove downtown and looked around. Once again we were impressed with what we saw.


Until we came upon this situation. You might try to blame this on being a really bad Christmas decoration except for the fact that it's stationary. It's weird and bad. With some paper mache and glitter glue, I could have created this in about 15 minutes. These days people use the term "art and sculpture" very loosely sometimes. This is awful, but we chose not to judge the city in its entirety from this one statue.


Then we rounded a corner and found these. At this moment I'm suppressing so many jokes, it's making my head hurt. All my energy is being used to prevent my head from literally exploding due to the suppression, therefore there'll be no commentary on said balls. OMG. I HAVE TO MOVE ON!!!!!!! But look at the sculpture kid trying to tiptoe through the water fountain. He's slightly better than the huge silver/gold bird thingy from the other picture. But only slightly, because in case you didn't notice, he's footless. That's not good.


No footless kid here, just the balls. I really really must move on.

I think I'm gonna make it without an exploding head.

Another factoid about Charlotte we didn't know was it's the home of the Carolina Panthers. We sort of figured it out when we saw a huge hulking football stadium just ahead.


The huge panther statues in front would be weird and awkward if not for the whole panthers being from Charlotte.


And that's where this post ends. I could leave it on a cliff hanger by asking, did we become so enchanted with Charlotte that we decided to stay the duration of our trip in the city? Or did we continue on to Durham so we could attend multi basketball games? Let me give you a heads up. All of the tickets were used.

Up next, another visit to Cameron Indoor Stadium on the Duke campus.