The Murals of Siler City – Explore the Murals but Stay for the Burgers

Siler City, North Carolina.

A visit to North Carolina in 2015 prompted a trip to the largest town in Chatham County. Our visit to North Carolina in 2018 brought us back to this town of a bit over 8000 residents in the western part of the county. For more background on our 2015 visit to Siler City, you can check out my post and gallery of photos here, and a guest post from my son, Joshua, who provided a much more detailed story here. In the opening photo above, this post features one of the murals that since 2001 have proliferated throughout the city’s downtown area. This image depicts Siler City very early in the 20th century.

Beaver Lake Bird Sanctuary – Wildlife Oasis in the City

Asheville, North Carolina.

Regular readers of this attempt at a travel blog will recognize that I like to stop at places where there might be birds to photograph. Careful viewers of my images will note that in many of these posts, there are few photographs of birds. I am not a birder and claim no expertise at identifying the many species of winged aviators (and non-aviators) in the world of birds. Nor do I know the best times of the year to visit these sites. In most cases, we are traveling near the area and decide to stop and see what we can find.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park – Most Visited Park in the U.S.

This post is being published on Christmas Day, 2018. Let me first start with wishing a Merry Christmas to my readers who celebrate the season.

There is no more beautiful way to travel between North Carolina and Tennessee than to drive through the Great Smoky Mountains. The park, most popular of the U.S. National Parks, hosts well over 10 million visitors per year. Second on that list is the Grand Canyon National Park. You won’t need your Senior Park Pass or shell out any green to visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as it is the only national park that doesn’t charge a fee to visit. On a late October day, we found ourselves traveling out of Asheville and for a short distance moving along the famed Blue Ridge Parkway, the 469-mile (755 km) highway that is also a National Park. At Cherokee, we turned off the parkway and soon found ourselves on Highway 441, a main road that traverses the park.

Asheville – Gateway to the Smoky Mountains

Asheville, North Carolina.

Continuing our tour of North Carolina, this year we decided to head west toward the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. October is a great time for catching the fall colors in this part of the country. We could tell that by the price of hotels on the weekend. Our original plan was to head there on Saturday and stay Saturday night, then tour the park on Sunday. What we discovered when we checked hotel pricing is that on Friday and Saturday nights in October, we could expect to spend upwards of $400 or more per night. Sunday night, however, was another story, room prices dropped by 50%. We quickly changed to staying Sunday and Monday night.

After arriving later in the day, I was wondering about a place to maybe have dinner and view the sunset. The hotel clerk recommended the Sky Bar and gave us basic directions to the downtown area. It wasn’t very long before we arrived downtown and found a space in a parking ramp. We set about walking toward what appeared to be the downtown core area and we soon saw the restaurant and bar tucked on a balcony high on a building. From the ground we could see they were quite full even for a Sunday evening. By the time we would have gotten seated, sunset would be a missed memory.

Hillsborough NC – Small Town with a Big History

Hillsborough, North Carolina.

Continuing our visits to small towns near our son’s home in North Carolina, we arrived in nearby Hillsborough just as a light rainfall was concluding. Our first stop would be for lunch, then a short walk to the visitor’s center to gain some knowledge of the historic points of interest in this county seat in Orange County, NC. Having recently learned of the Regulators and their impact on the Revolutionary War, this small town became a center of that turmoil.

Battle of Alamance – North Carolina

Alamance County, North Carolina.

As a college student, I fancied myself as a historian, though it was clearly misplaced. Having let whatever skills in that area I had atrophy over the last five decades or so, I am always amazed to find a roadside stop that brings up a historical note that I no longer recall, if I ever heard of it in the first place. Such is my visit to the Alamance Battleground.

North Carolina Botanical Garden – The Conservation Garden

Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

It seems I can’t bypass a botanical garden. You never know what kind of interesting plants you might find or what interesting facts you might learn there. For example, the carnivorous Venus Flytrap shown in the opening image is cultivated around the world, but is native only to coastal areas of the North and South Carolina. If an insect triggers the tiny hairs on the inside of the leaf, the plant closes in less than a second capturing the morsel and it’s lunchtime for the plant. Once it determines the morsel is edible, the leaf closes tightly and reopens in a few days to a couple of weeks depending upon the amount of time it takes to digest the morsel.