Starting December 19 and running through the end of the year, we’re suspending our normal programming so that we may help those of you with kids on winter break find stuff to do. Every day through year’s end we’ll throw out an idea intended to get you and the kids out of the house and have the kids exhausted upon your return. Consider it GetGoingNC.com’s gift to you. Today: Explore…
The following GGNC story appeared in the November 23 editions of The News & Observer in Raleigh and the Charlotte Observer. It’s rerun here, with links. For additional information about getting kids outside, visit yesterday’s post. The virtues of kids being outdoors have been touted in a number of studies. But when it comes down to it, the proof is in the playing. Mounting evidence shows our kids spend too…
Wings Over Water, feet on cliff faces, heads in the sky and gorgeous fall weather. What better reasons for getting out this weekend? Coast If you’ve ever needed incentive to get outdoors, Wings Over Water is it. The appropriately acronymed “WOW,” in its 14th year, is a six-day celebration of the wildlife and natural history (as well as human history as it relates to the natural world) of Eastern North…
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…
Curiously, when Marcy suddenly sounded like Curly in “We Want Our Mummy,” I thought back to a phone conversation we’d had last fall. I was on the Appalachian Trail, she was in our Cary backyard. I was in the wild, she was in suburbia. I was lounging at my campsite in the woods having tea, she was trying to figure out what to do with the four-foot copperhead sunning on…
Death, taxes, a hot-as-blazes Fourth of July — the givens of life here in the Piedmont. Except this year the hot-as-blazes Fourth took a holiday. Or at least the humidity did: The temperature may have been 90, but the humidity was a dry 30 percent. Perfect weather for a summer hike, perfect weather for exploring the Eno River. While the entire length of the 40-mile Eno is firmly within the…
Wednesday, I was hiking along the North Prong of Shining Rock Creek, a lively mountain stream that plunges 2,200 feet in just three miles through a narrow, overgrown canyon. I was in a reveric trance, lulled in part by the rugged vegetation here in the Shining Rock Wilderness, in part by the cloudless, 70-degree spring afternoon, when — Whoa! I like snakes, but their sudden appearance four feet away causes…