The first weekend of November? Really!? You know what that means — time is running short to explore the outdoors before the weather gets really cold. A few of your options this weekend: Coast Few things make you feel like a kid more than flying a kite. The thrill of getting your kite airborne after a dogged sprint, watching it climb higher and higher into the wild blue, chasing after…

It was a telling commentary on the times four years ago when Liz Baird came up with the idea for Take A Child Outside Week. The simple notion that you needed to dedicate a week to encouraging kids to go outside and play would have been preposterous just a decade earlier. Yet with the proliferation of video games and parents increasingly fearful of threats real and perceived, kids were staying…

It looked like a North Carolina beach except for one thing: The people were moving. We just got back from five days at Brigantine Beach, which sits just north of Atlantic City, N.J., though the gulf between the two couldn’t be greater. Atlantic City is all about glitz and gambling, Brigantine Beach is about kicking back — and kicking in. Even before we got to the beach I could tell…

Spence March has long been concerned over whether his kids are getting enough exercise. Four years ago, he enrolled them in a running program. And being a good dad and realizing that kids pay more attention if you practice what you preach, he enrolled with them. It was a good experience for all, but March wasn’t content to let it be a one-time event. Like most parents, March likes the…

In honor of Celebrate North Carolina State Parks weekend, which is this weekend, we cull our recommendations from this weekend’s State Park offerings. Coast 1. Ever see “Little Shop of Horrors” (either the 1960 Roger Korman original or the 1986 Frank Oz remake)? A man-eating plant! How outlandish, you likely thought. Not really, it turns out. OK, so sundews, bladderworts, butterworts, pitcher plants, and the Venus fly trap may not…

A couple weeks ago I mentioned a report from the Center on Everyday Lives of Families at UCLA that found, among other things, that middle class American families have spacious backyards that they rarely use. This got me reminiscing about those halcyon days of my youth on South Boston Court when we did everything from play the World Series and Super Bowl (which hadn’t been invented yet) to tight rope…

As a kid growing up in 1960s suburban America, I played “stadium” baseball, rode intricate routes on my bike, trampolined, played tackle football, engaged in hours-long games of hide-’n’-seek, went sledding played indoor basketball and tightroped. And I did it all without leaving our block. I was reminded of my cul-de-sac-as-adventure-park youth Sunday by a New York Times story on UCLA’s CLEF project. The Center on Everyday Lives of Families…

In the April Outside magazine, I read about stand-up paddleboarding and thought, there’s another crazy thing I’ll never try. Last week, I walked out of Great Outdoor Provision Co. and thought, Man, there’s something I can’t wait to try. The difference perspective makes. Here’s how the Outside article started (quoting from the drop headline): “Masochistic surf kook bent on taming very large stand-up paddleboard seeks Graveyard of the Atlantic for…

The next time you hear someone badmouth all the New Yorkers here, invoke the name of Jessalee Landfried. She’s the reason we’ll get to ride our bikes, free of motorized traffic, over a mile-long loop of downtown Durham streets Sunday afternoon, and she’s only lived here since September. Think about that. In less than nine months, she moved from the Big Apple, started a new job, moved into a new…

Story in today’s The News & Observer about the high cost and other challenges of feeding kids a healthy lunch at school. Healthy food is more expensive — and thus costs the kids/parents more — and because most high schools at least let older kids leave campus over lunch, there’s competition from the outside. I believe McDonald’s Dollar Menu was mentioned. There is one alternative that gets short-shrift in this…