North Carolina

Rich and I had a blast in North Carolina!

We had a few mishaps while driving... on the way there one of the tires on the camper blew, so Rich had to change it on the side of the highway, at like midnight. Then when he got the spare on, it was also flat. So we tried calling AAA, but they said since Dad wasn't there they couldn't do anything for us. So I called Mom and Dad back and they suggested trying the bicycle pump we happened to have with us. Neither of us expected it to actually work, but somehow it did. So we were back on the road. We drove until about 3, then we took a short nap, lol about 3 hours outside of Louisville.

We finally made it to the campsite at Jordan Lake, right outside of Raleigh. The campsite was awesome! Nice and shady, not many other people around, and a little lake right next to us. We set up the camper without too much trouble and then took a bike ride down to the beach on the lake.

We drove down to Fayetteville and visited the Airborne and Spec Ops museum, and a friend of Rich's who is based at Fort Bragg. Then we kept going down the Carolina Beach. We got our campsite there and set up our tent. Then we headed to the beach, which was awesome! Rich just sat in awe for a few minutes since it was the first time he had ever seen the ocean. He was a little leery of actually getting in, and I told him I wouldn't get in with him so I could take pictures :) But once he got in he LOVED it! Except for the taste, lol. We even built sand castles :) We got some ice cream and headed down the pier.

The next morning we walked all the way to the beach to see the sunrise. It was a little disappointing because of the clouds, but it was still unlike anywhere else. Later we took the Ft. Fischer Ferry to Southport and walked around there. Got some souvenirs and then headed back. We went to the Ft Fischer Aquarium which was neat. And spent a little more time at the beach before heading back to the camper. We got there after the gate was already closed, so then we had to walk back to our campsite.

We went into Raleigh for the next two days, and spent some time checking out the museums and took a couple tours. We took a carriage ride and a trolley and got to see all of the Victorian homes.

Then it was time to pack up and head home. It was sad to leave, I definately could have spent more time down there. The weather was amazing the entire time, and we found a bunch of free stuff to do, and it would have been neat to rent a boat and go out on the lake. We took a different route home, and got to see more of the Smoky Mts. But they took longer to get through than we expected, and Dad's gas gauge stopped working... and we ran out of gas 4 miles from the next gas station. Rich offered to ride his bike to get some gas, but I wouldn't let him, cause it's a mountain road and wasn't very wide. So I used the GPS to find the closest Tow business, and an hour and $80 later we had four gallons of gas to get us to the closest gas station. Since we lost that time we decided not to drive all the way through and stopped in Nashville, and our hotel had a pretty cool view of the city. And it had a king size bed which was awesome :)

Then it was time to get back to reality. We both had to work the following day...