Hanging Out in the Sticks

North Carolina is known for a lot of things other than just Duke and UNC basketball, and on Monday morning we headed west to experience country life.

After a stop at Waffle House for breakfast, we hopped onto the highway and passed by numerous chain restaurants that we don't have back home, like Bojangles, Hardee's (aka Carl's Junior), Biscuitville, and even KFC buffet. Our first actual stop was Bill Davis Racing in High Point, NC. BDR may not be as famous as some of the other racing shops in North Carolina, but unlike the others, they allow you to walk directly onto the floor of shop, and to get an up close and personal view of the cars and trucks driven by Dave Blaney, Mike Skinner, and Johnny Benson. Ava was pretty ambivalent about the whole experience, but the mechanics definitely liked her.
Right down the street from BDR are the offices of W. Schillig, where our friends Kristy and John work. W. Schillig makes high end leather couches and sectionals, and MARKET (the giant international furniture trade show) had just ended, so Kristy and John took us downtown to see the W. Schillig showroom. It wasn't just like going to a furniture store. Imagine every furniture store you've ever seen in your life put into huge buildings. From the outside you wouldn't have any idea what was inside, but once there it's one giant showroom after another. Ava enjoyed playing with Kristy, and crawling around all the furniture.
Not far away is the world's largest freestanding chest of drawers (smaller than the chest of drawers at Furnitureland South, but this one isn't just stuck onto the outside of a building).
Afterward, we headed to semi-rural Sophia, NC to the O'Rourke house, which isn't too far away from High Point, but it might as well be a world away. While Kristy and John live in a small development, it's not like any development in Southern California. Rather, they have a nice big house on an acre of land with lots of trees. It's the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else - just down the road to their house you pass by a cow pasture, and the little neighbor girl drives up on her electric ATV (her gas powered one wasn't running) to ask if Kristy and John's 2 year old Jack can come out to play. While we were there, Ava played with Jack (who looooves bubbles), and with their cat Dakota. Ava had never met a cat before, and wasn't really sure what to make of him, but didn't mind him at all. Sophia isn't too far from Winston-Salem, so we went with Kristy and John to Old Salem. Salem was settled by the Moravians in the mid-18th century, and is now a well-preserved living history sight (sort of like Colonial Williamsburg). We wandered around town, talked with craftsmen like a gunsmith, and had lunch at the olde tavern.It was great to be able to spend a couple days with our friends, and unlike previous vacations we were able to spend a good amount of time just relaxing and hanging out.

Devils, Movie Stars, and Bulls

We started off our vacation proper by heading to breakfast at Elmo's Diner in Durham - no relation to the Sesame Street character. I had some fantastic biscuits and gravy, along with a side of cinnamon apples (basically apple pie filling). Thanks to Ito for the suggestion. Ava enjoyed playing with a spoon, and we fed her sweet potato puffs (sort of like star-shaped cheerios, but softer and easier for babies to eat). Ava had a little bit of trouble figuring out how to eat the puffs in her mouth at first, but as the trip wore on she started to become a real pro.

Our first destination was the Duke Gardens, which they refer to as the Crown Jewel of Duke. In addition to tons of flowers and plants, the gardens also include a huge pond filled with ducks.
The Gardens are located on East Campus, so we headed to the main campus to wander around a bit. Although the main student commons were a bit depressing - dark, drab concrete interior, with a cramped student store - I did find a Mike Kryzyewksi bobblehead (with money going to charity), and the rest of the campus was very pretty, especially the Duke Chapel. The chapel, done in an English, pseudo-Gothic style towers over the campus, and is filled with amazing stained glass windows.

One of the themes of our trip was trying to schedule things around Ava's nap schedule. Our main tactic was to try to get her to sleep in the car, since it's not like we could just plop down our Pack-N-Play in the middle of the Duke campus (although I'm sure the sorority girls who were putting together a charity pancake breakfast would have adored her). On this day, our late morning trip took us to Smithfield, the home town of Ava Gardner and home to the Ava Gardner Museum, which is about an hour away. For those of you who don't know, Ava Gardner was a movie star in the 40s and 50s, who received an Academy Award nomination for her role in Mogambo (alongside Clark Gable and Grace Kelly), and who was married to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra. The museum did a great job of telling her life story through videos, photos, paintings, and costumes.

After visiting Smithfield, we headed back to Durham for a late afternoon baseball game between the Durham Bulls (AAA Tampa Bay) and the Scranton-Wilkes Barre Yankees (AAA NYY). After the movie Bull Durham was released in 1988, the team's popularity increased, and they built a beautiful new ballpark in 1995, and later moved from being a A team to a AAA team. The new park is located right next to an old tobacco warehouse area, which has been redeveloped into a shopping area. Rather than getting normal seats, we got seats in the outfield lawn so Ava could crawl around. In addition to the lawn, the park features a huge wall in left field called the "Blue Monster," what appears to be an office building hovering over the outfield, and the famous "Hit Bull, Win Steak" sign above the Blue Monster. Although we didn't get to see a Bulls homer (and the corresponding smoke coming out of the Bulls nostrils), we did get a good 2-0 win for the home team. More importantly, Ava had a blast crawling around on the grass - even though we had to bundle her up in 2 jackets and a hat due to the chill that came down when the sun went behind the clouds. To top it off, the Bulls have some of the best food options in baseball, including a BBQ Dog - a footlong hot dog topped with pulled pork and cole slaw.

After the game, we made a quick detour to the historic Durham Athletic Park to check out the old stadium where the movie was filmed. More than a bit run down, it was still cool to see, and we snapped a few quick pictures before heading in for the night.

Ava goes to Durham

On Saturday, April 12, we set out on our first family vacation. We started with with a flight from John Wayne to Dallas and then on to Raleigh/Durham. Although we had to give Ava her pacifier (aka dummy) more often than we normally do on the flight, Ava did quite well on both flights, and especially enjoyed sitting next to the window on the second flight. It's always nice getting compliments on how well behaved she is, even if we're always worried that she's being too loud.

Due to a delay in Dallas, we arrived in Raleigh/Durham a little later than we expected, but that was pretty minor. Unfortunately, we then had to deal with getting our rental car. We were using Alamo because it was by far the cheapest car rental outfit, and we soon found out why. Although there were only a few people in front of us in line, there was effectively only one person who could serve us because the other employee spent the entire time helping a couple who apparently had made last minute online reservations, but had no acceptable form of payment, and the self-service computer wasn't really self-service at all as even after you typed in all your information you still needed to see a customer service person. After finally getting through to the front of the line, the manager encountered a computer glitch prompting him to ask for my address not once, not twice, not even three times, but four separate times. I got the keys to our car (a Pontiac Grand Prix, which worked out quite well for us), and then had to do my good deed for the day.

The group in front of us (three teachers and a baby) needed my help because they had ordered a car seat, and the Alamo folks either couldn't or wouldn't install it for them. I tried to install the flimsy, dirty thing Alamo called a car seat without any instructions, and that just wouldn't do. Even if it did have instructions, it would hardly be safe enough to carry a bag of groceries. Finally, the ladies were able to convince Alamo to give them a new seat. After a few minutes of struggling with the seat belts (and an hour of being at Alamo), I was able to get the seat into place, and we parted ways, and headed to our hotel.

After the struggle that was Alamo, it was great to be greeted by the friendly folks at the Four Points Sheraton, and to be upgraded to a junior suite. With a free flight and free hotel room it looked like things would be going smoothly from here on out (unfortunately Starwood failed us down the road). For the time being, everything was splendid, and we were able to give Ava a bath in the bathroom sink. The first time in a long time that she's bathed in a sink rather than in the mini-bath that sits in the tub or on the counter.