R and J in the USA

Having traveled North Carolina, our 40th state, we can now officially say that we have gone from sea to shining sea, as this state marks our first return to the beautiful Atlantic Ocean since bidding it adieu last July on the beaches of Portsmouth, NH.

With South Carolina, Georgia and Florida being our next 3 states, we’ll have plenty more of the vast Atlantic to dip our toes into and cast our gazes upon before we loop back into the Gulf states and up inland towards home. 

North Carolina is a state that has a little bit of everything and the people in North Carolina know it and, as far as we can tell, love it. If you are in central North Carolina, you are three hours from the mountains and three miles from the ocean, and there are plenty of lakes, rivers, and gorgeous scenery throughout the state. North Carolina has big cities and small towns and everything in between. In our experience, North Carolina was a warm and welcoming place wherever we went. Almost everyone we had the pleasure of talking with quickly felt like an old friend we simply hadn’t seen in a while, especially when we visited an old friend of ours on the coast, that we simply hadn’t seen in a while.

We began our North Carolina adventures in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, which straddles the border with Tennessee. Since we crossed the border of the states inside the National Park, we had to get our “Welcome to North Carolina” sign when leaving it to head into South Carolina, though we snapped a picture of the little wooden sign modestly marking the border of the states on the side of a gorgeous mountain overlook parking lot. 

There are very few places on this trip where a lack of freshness in the air detracts from the trip (though there are a few city spots where pungency has marked the moment). Still, it is particularly striking when you find yourself breathing in air that feels so fresh it seems to purge every negative thing in the world when it fills your lungs. That is how we felt when we opened the van doors in our camping spot in the Smokies to take in the starry night and acquaint ourselves with our temporary home. It was a wonderfully fresh and refreshing welcome to North Carolina. 

We had read that there are 389 reported negative bear encounters in the park every year, so we weren’t interested to linger too long with the van doors open and its various fragrances floating out into the forest.

The Great Smoky Mountain National Park is the most visited National Park in the USA. The peace and beauty of the layers of undulating mountains from the overlooks make it easy to understand the draw. The miles and miles of hiking trails, fishing spots, wildlife and general sense of peace and beauty all make it more than worth a visit. 

We enjoyed a much shorter hike than we would someday like to have, but we still had a sense like we got to have a Smoky Mountain experience.

After a stop at one of the park’s many visitor’s centers where we got to hear a whole cornucopia of different North Carolinian accents, from a deep Appalachian drawl to soft North Carolina lilt, we headed to the town of Cherokee, part of the sovereign Cherokee Nation and home of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee just outside of the park’s borders.

There, at the Museum of the Cherokee, Julie learned a little bit about the Cherokee that remained in North Carolina in the early 19th century despite the forced removal that resulted from President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. 

Our next stop was Asheville, North Carolina. Well, it was originally meant to be a stop and we had originally planned to visit the Biltmore estate, a massive mansion and landscape of curated grounds built by the Vanderbilts. We ended up being too luxurious with our morning to make it a stop, but we did a drive-through of charming Asheville and drove up to the gates of the Biltmore with the hope that we might be able to use the hour left before its 5:00 PM closing time for a visit. Alas, this stop would land on our list of “not enough research done to pull it off”. Though the building would remain open until 5:00 PM, the last entry was at 3:00 PM. We could tell just by the ornateness of the gates just to get onto the road to drive up to the mansion the level of extreme wealth and ornateness that surely lay behind it. 

We had a decision to make. Ryan had really wanted to see the Biltmore, this being the second time in his life he had gotten to Asheville with the intent to see it and the circumstances not being friendly to his efforts. We discussed whether we would stay overnight in Asheville and make it the Biltmore our morning activity or whether we would carry on to our intended destination for the night. Ultimately, even though we would have loved to explore Asheville more than just what we could see from inside the window and Ryan would need to continue on with the Biltmore on his destinations-to-see list, we would continue on north towards Grandfather Mountain.

As the trip carries on, we find ourselves slowing down more and more in our day-to-day pace. We always love to have a full morning to work on things in the van. But, even on the days when we plan to forgo such a luxury and get going earlier in the day, we have a tendency to run later and later.

Since we left a state without having finished our end of state activities (blog writing, song writing, postcard writing and sending), we had more to do than usual on the morning we planned to hike Grandfather Mountain. Rather than leaving the campsite at the originally planned 9:00 AM to leave plenty of time open for our day on the mountain, we didn’t leave the RV park until a little after noon. Oops.

We had planned to go for a nice long hike at Grandfather Mountain. Neither of us had heard of it before we went, but once reading about it as a beautiful area of natural beauty, wildlife diversity, a mountain that was almost 6,000 feet high, and a beautiful swinging bridge, we were looking forward to filling our day with outdoor activities there.

When we arrived, we encountered a few other factors that, sadly, made us abandon our five mile hike plans, and even abandon the shorter three mile hike, and eventually surrender to a short 0.8 mile out and back mini-hike that ended up being quite lovely.

The first factor was that we didn’t arrive until just before 1:00 PM, and the park closed at 5:00 PM. The five mile hike was advertised as taking 4–5 hours. Then we learned that hikers had to be back at their cars by 4:00 PM, otherwise a search party would be sent out. That meant we had a very tight three hours to do a hike. This seemed like enough time to still do the shorter three mile hike that was supposed to have tremendous views. There being a lot of scrambling, ladder climbing, and rope holding to scale the elevation, these were seemingly a slow three miles.

The biggest deterrent didn’t come until our van finished driving the road up to the top of the mountain, a full mile above sea level at its peak. The wind coming through that top parking lot was so strong we could feel the van rock in the direction that it pushed. When we got out of the van to walk into the visitors center, the 40 miles per hour wind gusts physically pushed us forward towards its entrance. The doors had to be pried open against the refusal of the wind fighting them back. Between the tight time window and the unknown of what scrambling up seven ladders in 40 miles an hour wind gusts would be like, we decided it wasn’t the day to take on the adventure. 

The upside of this choice was that we had plenty of time to enjoy the short hike that went underneath the swinging bridge before we went up and crossed the swinging suspension bridge.

It was actually pretty fantastic. The winds were steady at 20 mph with 42 mph gusts. As the wind passed around the bridge and the wind tunnel underneath, the entire bridge operated like a massive organ, with gorgeous whistles of different tones radiating around us. Depending on the mood you were in, they could sound like creepy tones or angelic choirs surrounding you as you marched through the forest.

Crossing the bridge, at a full mile above sea level (though only dozens of feet above the valley below) was really neat. The views were incredible, and as long as you held onto your hat, you could stand in the middle of the metal bridge and feel the wind rock and swing it back and forth.

Once you crossed the bridge, you had views that you usually have to earn with a lot more sweat and hours of trekking.

We were able to leave earlier than planned, which allowed us to arrive in Greensboro nice and early, with plenty of time for dinner at reasonable hour. 

Our planned stop for the next day was the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, located in the old Woolworth Building where the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins led to the company eventually getting rid of its policy of racial segregation at lunch counters in its southern state stores.

We found a place on the main drag to park for the morning. Ryan found a great coffee shop down the road to work in while Julie worked away on her projects in the van until joining him a few hours later. We had a great time in the Northern Roots Coffeehouse, not just enjoying the space, but also having two separate interactions that we felt warranted a post in our People Along the Way section, one with the husband of the shop’s owner, and the other with some fellow patrons. 

Ryan wandered about town a bit and Julie worked on a writing project before rejoining for the 3:00 tour at the International Museum of Civil Rights.

The museum was a powerful experience. Unlike other museums we’ve been in and other tours we’ve been on, the tour was almost as much a performative art piece than a sharing of information. It was clear that the museum was designed to be an immersive experience and to take participants on a journey through civil rights.

Because the museum was called the International Civil Rights Museum, we had thought and hoped that we would be learning about civil rights and civil rights movements in countries throughout the world. It was purely focused on the civil rights journey of America, though, so we never quite understood what “international” referred to. Still, it was a profoundly enriching and educational experience that we would highly recommend to anyone interested in learning about the Civil Rights journey in the United States of America.  

Our next stop was Durham, where we planned to take a little walk on the Duke University campus. Though it is not at the top of our state-by-state to-do list, where it works and when we have time, we like to check out colleges and universities when we can. We tallied the colleges we’ve visited on this trip, if only in a short and cursory way, and figured we’ve been to twenty campuses in our first forty states. We popped inside the iconic Duke chapel and admired the architecture before moving on to our home for the night in a Cracker Barrel parking lot in Raleigh. 

The next day, we headed to another college campus to run the Fostering Footsteps 5K, which you can read about in our 5K section. 

Our next stop was the state capitol in Raleigh to check.

After having visiting the Civil Rights Museum the day before, our visit to the capitol gave added dimension to the education of that struggle. At the capitol there was an exhibit about the unknown names of the enslaved people who had built it. There were monuments on the grounds to leaders from North Carolina’s past who had been confederate leaders or staunch segregationists.

Interestingly, we weren’t the only ones who had chosen that date and time to converge on the North Carolina state capitol. We happened to walk the capitol grounds at the same time Proud Boys rally commenced. They appeared to be marching regarding water rights for the Lumbee tribe, which was not something we expected to see on their signs. They behaved non-violently, though we were witness to an almost incident that was, thankfully averted. We chatted with capitol police officers and learned that the group was apparently attempting to clean up its image, and so was cooperating with all of the rules and specifically wanting to not be violent. We both experienced a mix of emotions seeing it. This is part of what this trip is about, seeing what is alive in this country and how different people think and feel, even when the way they think and feel are ways that we don’t understand and don’t like. Julie wanted so badly to be able to sit down and talk with one of them, just to try to understand. This, of course, would have been an insane thing to do, so we simply observed as they marched around the grounds before we heading into the capitol. 

After our capitol visit, we wondered through some of Raleigh’s nearby streets before hopping on the road to head south and east.

We would have loved to head east and north to Kitty Hawk to visit the site of the Wright Brothers first flight, but the extra day we took all the way back between Missouri and Tennessee would make it not feasible. Ryan had been there before, and we have both been to the Outer Banks on other occasions, so we accepted it as a stop we wouldn’t get to make on this trip.

Our next stop was Pine Knolls Shore, North Carolina. This would double as our trip to the North Carolina coast and a chance to see our good friend Andy. Julie hadd seen Andy when she stopped there on her musical-writing trip the year before, and Ryan hadn’t seen him in several years. Our friends Andy and Suzanne had lived in Rochester for decades, but moved back to Suzanne’s home state of North Carolina in 2017. Ryan had still not had a chance to visit. Suzanne was out of town, unfortunately, but we had a great time with Andy, ever the above and beyond host. 

Andy took us for a great hike at the beach at Fort Macon State Park, where we got to see some World War II sights and got our first view of the Atlantic Ocean since July. 

Julie also needed to get her North Carolina swim in and was excited to have her first swim in a natural body of water since Hawaii. The water looked cold, and, while we ran into a few folks doing a quick polar plunge, Julie was glad she opted for a wetsuit.

The waves were rolling and Julie was nervous about rip currents. Luckily one of the young men we ran into that was jumping in for a polar plunge was also a life guard and offered to go in with Julie and do the 10 strokes that she had determined were the minimum to count for “swimming in a state”. The water was cold and she had trouble resisting her bodies primal urge to keep pulling her face out of the cold. That plus the torrent of the waves giving her mouthful after mouthful of water, she managed to get in 15 or so strokes, mostly of breast stroke with her own personal life guard right next to her. It was pretty fantastic.

After saying our goodbye to Andy, who generously allowed us to empty our recycling and compost, we drove south toward Wilmington. We parked the van in Wrightsville Beach with a beautiful view of the water and the sunset as we worked our tails off to finish as many of our end of state activities as we could before heading into South Carolina.

We headed west after sunset and spent the night in a Walmart parking lot in Lumberton, North Carolina, from which we head into South Carolina the next day

If you’ve read any one of our other blog posts, you might be expecting to hear us say that we loved our time in North Carolina and didn’t want to leave. Well, we certainly want to deliver on expectations…that is exactly what we have to say. If there are any states not worth a visit, we haven’t seen them yet.