Labor Day weekend — the last hurrah of summer. Make sure you make the most of it.
Coast | Coastal Plain
Any event of athletic endurance should end with a flourish. Few end with the flourish of the Go Jump in the Lake 5K, 10K and 15 K in Boiling Springs.
If you shy away from multi-sport races because they often include swimming (and you’re a sinker, not a floater) then you’ll like Saturday’s 6th Annual Wrightsville Beach Biathlon at Wrightsville Beach. If you like signs of spring, you’ll like Saturday’s totally awesome program at Lake Crabtree County Park in Morrisville. And if you like an early season road race but aren’t in early season form, then you’ll like the distractions of Saturday’s Valley of the Lilies Half Marathon and 5K on and around the mountain campus of Western Carolina University.
Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video or slide show of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.
Today’s 90-Second Escape: Huck-A-Buck Redux
This is considered the first weekend of summer in the tourism industry. The kids are mostly out of school, let the family escapes begin. To the coast, for a standup paddleboard or kayak tour, to the Piedmont for some fat tire fun, to the mountains for a mellow hike.
In September, GetGoingNC.com made the transition from telling you what you can do to showing you: we started GetHiking! Triangle, which leads weekly hikes in the Triangle and beyond. Our target audience: newcomers to hiking and established hikers interested in learning new trails. The initial response has exceeded our expectations. We currently have 344 members and have attracted more than 50 people to our hikes.