The Tarheel basketball game

After the scary scary night and the tragic ice cream event, we went home to our hotel to rest and get ready for game day. Melanie picked out a great place for us to stay and we made ourselves right at home wallowing for the short amount of time we were actually in the room...which wasn't much. We had adjoining rooms and it was all comfy cozy. As you can see the girls enjoyed our down time.


I LOVE ADJOINING ROOMS!


Four beds to wallow in and you can country holler from room to room. It's so fun!


As you can see we were so interesting.


Love that face Carlie.


And then, it had arrived, game day. Clearly Carlie's practicing her tarheel game face.


Trying to have Chick-fil-a all day all the time was never easy because if you remember we tried to get chicken biscuits the day before. They said they weren't serving breakfast anymore but how can you STOP serving breakfast at 10:30 when the place doesn't open until after 10:30? It was stupid. So in Durham we had a Chick-fil-a right next to our house....but guess what? They aren't open on Sunday. It was VERY frustrating. So off we went to Panera Bread and then after a quick stroll through the mall, we made our way back to the Dean Dome to drop Melanie and Carlie off to enjoy their basketball game while the rest of us spent the afternoon looking for something to do.

Almost there!


Off they go to the North Carolina Tarheel basketball game on another rainy day.


Carlie took lots of photos of the pregame, game and after game. There's lots of Carolina blue in the dome. Although Melanie had some tense moments of not feeling well during the game, Carlie would say the event was a success and worth every mile and dollar.


This place is HUGE!


Carlie's very happy about her surroundings.


The team's warming up ready to take on the poor people they beat the crap out of.


There's some major nose bleed sections in the Dean Dome.


It might be impossible for me to commentate on all the basketball photos either North Carolina or Duke.


Retired jerseys of former players. Michael Jordan's one of them.


National championship banners.


Another view of the dome.


That's Roy Williams the head coach of the tarheels.


It's game on for the tarheels.


They were winning handily.


UNC ended up scoring over 100 points which meant free biscuits for everyone from some place in town!


Carlie's happy about the win and the biscuits although she didn't actually get a biscuit.

It was a successful venture if you were a tarheel fan.....the other team, not so much.

Next up will be our afternoon while they were at the game. I know people are riveted with the play by play of our trip.

The sad ice cream story

I forgot one very important event from the scary scary night in the previous post. Many times in my past, Chinese food has been just as scary for me as a scary scary night. Let's just say it doesn't always "agree" with my tummy so as a precaution after we ate Pei Wei, I insisted we find something cold and creamy in order to ensure soothing the tum tum. I WANTED ICE CREAM! So Melanie goggled a Baskin Robbins....YUM....and we were off in search of the deliciousness.

Thirty minutes later after we had driven down street after street after street, we were becoming increasingly discouraged thinking we might never find the happiness we sought. Suddenly out of nowhere in a back street that looked like crack ally, we accidentally ran across it!. We had ALMOST missed it! We almost missed our promised treat! It was so exciting! We had finally found the object of our affections.

We sent the girls in to get the cream. We waited with anticipation. It was going to be soooo good. Chocolate chip and pralines and cream. UMMMMM. Then, we got the devastating news. They had neither of our flavors! They had like 2 kinds of ice cream and no freaking spoons and I'm not even kidding. The ice cream store had NO SPOONS. And where the heck were the other flavors? BR is supposed to have 31 flavors. We were desperate for more flavors. This place was masquerading as a Baskin Robbins! It was all a bad dream on a scary night. We both had to "settle" for something else, World class chocolate to be exact.

I'm not quite over it yet.

I still relive it occasionally.

Maybe someday I'll stop remembering the horror.

Durham on a foggy freaky night

So, after Pei Wei on Saturday evening we decided to go explore the Durham area a little more. Apparently after 14 hours in the car, we hadn't had enough. We meandered through the streets for a bit and finally made our way back to the deserted Duke campus. Now, as I mentioned before, it was rainy and foggy during most of the trip so when we saw those Gothic buildings in the dark and foggy night, they were looking mighty freaky. The fog had enveloped the buildings and it was swirling around in the night sky and it all made for a setting worthy of a Hitchcock movie. We drove back to the chapel and when we rounded the corner, it all made for an amazing sight to behold. There were spotlights on the enormous spires atop the chapel and shining straight into the sky. Because of the fog it looked like the spires reached to the sky and touched it! The night sky had an eerie orange hue to it. I'm saying it was FREAKY....memorable....but FREAKY!

Even though this picture is blurry, it paints a great picture of the night.


See the color of the night sky? It was so weird looking.


These are a combination of Melanie's pictures and mine. This place is so beautiful. Especially on a foggy freaky night.




We rode back to Cameron Indoor Stadium and the Duke girls got out and walked around a bit.


And that's when they discovered this sign. This is where people set up tents beginning in January in order to be in line for buying tickets to the upcoming games. They sort of live in the tents for weeks at a time. Cameron only holds about 9500 people so it's first come first serve. I would NEVER be one of these people. I do believe 2 of my 3 daughters would be...as well as Maggie.


I'm thinking Emma would not.


Although the girl loves a photo op.


They continued to have a blast wherever we went.


So when we finished our riding around, we were headed out of the campus and came to a red light. As we were sitting there, and another car was sitting across from us, we saw this man walking down the street in our direction. Because of the fog and the dark night, we could only see his silhouette as he came closer to us. It made it all look much more creepy. We could see he was carrying something in his hands. The light seemed to take FOREVER to change and the closer he got, the freakier it got because we were just sitting there and he was coming right for us! OK, he wasn't really coming right for us but he was walking towards our direction....and it was foggy... Anyway, we finally saw that he was carrying crutches! I don't really know why that deserved an exclamation point but I thought about it for a sec and decided it did. It's gets curiouser and curiouser as to why he was carrying crutches near the Duke campus on a rainy foggy night in January 2011....and he wasn't even limping.....surely we'll never know the story. Who carries crutches down a dark street at night in the middle of nowhere? An ax murderer that's who! OK that made absolutely no sense at all but I decided it was worthy of adding.

So to sum up:
It was a dark, foggy freaky night.
We were in a locked car.
The light took forever to change to green means go.
The ax murderer was walking down the street towards us.
He was carrying crutches.
I had to decide if I would run a red light in front of the car across from us if the scary man got to close to us.
I in no way believe if he knew there was a car full of 7 women sitting there watching him walk down the street he would have tried to do anything but throw down his crutches and run as far and as fast as he could in the opposite direction of us.

But I'm just sayin it was super super freaky!

I shall never forget it as long as I live.

This is the end to one of the scariest nights I ever survived.

OK that's not really true either but everything that's questionable in this post sounded really really good in my head.

Finding UNC

We left the Duke campus in search of the University of North Carolina which is just down the road from each other so it wasn't long before we found it. We made our way to the mega huge Dean Dome hoping for the same fortune in gaining access to the floor, but alas it was not to be. All the doors on the entire perimeter were checked hoping to find one unlocked but is was to no avail. We were reduced to peeking through the front doors and discovering the team UNC was going to play the next afternoon on the court practicing.

Pushu.

We wanted in!

We had to be satisfied with the outside....we were not...and so after we had thoroughly exhausted any attempt to break in, and took some pictures, we were on our way to have a look at the rest of the campus.


This is where the tarheels play their games. It's enormous.


Another view.


Love their flags.


In case you didn't already know, this is tarheel territory.


Carlie finally found something to be happy about.


She's still happy.


Looking for open doors? Nope locked up tight as a drum.


Maggie's pacing and very much not at home here.


One person's happiness is another person's roll of the eyes.


OK she's trying to put on a happy face for a sec.


Umm Caitlin? What?


Carlie's joy can't be squashed.


Still outside the Dean Dome.


Melanie and Carlie would be attending the game the next day.


Are we both excited?


No idea what this place is.


Huge buildings were everywhere but we had no idea what they were.

They were all lovely as well but as you can see, VERY different from Duke's architecture.

Then we found this place which was lovely but we knew nothing about.


So once again I went to the handy dandy Internet and found out info about the structure behind Carlie.

The Bell Tower was built in 1931, is 167 feet tall and contains a dozen bells weighing from 200 to 3,500 pounds each. The bells were manually played until they were programmed to play solo in 1967. The Tower was a gift of John Motley Morehead, class of 1891, and Rufus Lenoir Patterson, class of 1893. Every fifteen minutes the bells chime, and several times a day it plays various songs. It is a tradition for seniors to climb the belltower during senior week.


UGH!! Apparently there were bells ringing everywhere and we missed them all. I'm so sad we didn't get to hear the sounds ringing in the afternoon air. I'm certain it would have been enchanting.


And once again as you can see, the campus was deserted. That may have been my favorite thing about the entire trip. We checked to see how many students attend both schools and discovered the combined total was 40,000 students! Can you imagine what it would have been like trying to navigate the streets on campus with that many people walking around? It would have been a nightmare for reals. But instead, it was ours to crawl around going 15 miles an hour for 2 days. Yes indeed we had it so much better than we could have imagined.


Another lovely part of the UNC campus. There were so many pretty places to walk to but we just didn't have enough time and it was ALWAYS raining.


We were specifically looking for a well located on the campus. This well was and is a big deal.


With very little trouble we found it and of course we had to take pictures to document that we'd been there.


So I looked up info about the well and here's what I found out from the university's website.

At the heart of the campus stands the visual symbol of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For many years the Old Well served as the sole water supply for Old East and Old West dormitories. In 1897, the well was given its present decorative form at the direction of President Erwin A. Alderman, who described his beautification project as largely derived from the Temple of Love in the Garden of Versailles. In 1954 the well was given added beauty with brick walks, plantings, and benches. Students can bring good luck with a drink from the Old Well on the first day of classes.

Carlie's taking a sip but not for luck.


Ummm delicious.


Almost all the girls were present.


It's a lovely little gazebo but it was too dark to get a beautiful picture of it.


We're still happy to be here though.


And even though we don't really know what all that is behind Carlie, it's all very lovely.

I also learned this from the university's website.

This university was founded in 1793 when the cornerstone was laid on October 12 marking the construction on America's first state university.

I had no idea about any of this.

Carlie's still pleased.


The campus was covered with old oak trees and lovely buildings. There was so much of the campus that had to be accessed by foot though and therefore we didn't get to see as much of it as we would have liked. We needed at least 2 more days to just walk around and look at all the history there.


There was always more to see.


We just needed more time, lots of daylight and sunshine. And keys to buildings!


And then Caitlin began her ridiculous picture taking.

She took so many and none of them made any sense. I'll have to gain access to them and post some to observe the ridiculousness.

After we had seen both campuses, we were off to the hotel to check in and then to Pei Wei for supper. We also did lots more riding around. I'll have more about that later. But check out the car pics below. I love a good or even bad car picture. It's just something I can't explain.

Check out Maggie's face. See what I mean. I love stuff like this. It makes me happy.


Caitlin hasn't relinquished the camera yet. But check out that face.


Finally one good picture of everyone. Apparently Maggie's telling me, one more chance to get it right.


Everyone quit looking at me except for Olivia. Thank you Olivia.

We had so much fun even though it went by so quickly that we passed ourselves on the highway.

It's already been a week since we left.

Time freaks me out man!!

It freaks me out!!