Heels of Tar
The long-delayed writeup of last March’s weeklong excursion to Raleigh/Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina. Added here more to complete our set of scouting reports than to provide anything of interest to readers.
Thu March 14: Travel
We left on the warmest early spring day Pittsburgh had seen thus far in 2019, although we still passed snow in the Laurel Highlands. As we drove south beyond Richmond VA, we came across dogwoods and magnolia trees in blossom, and a surprising amount of mixed forest. It was a long but bearable 8 hour drive, and traffic wasn't intolerable.
Arriving in Durham, we checked into our AirBnB before a mediocre dinner at Bull City Burger, decent ice cream at Parlour, and grocs at Food Lion.
Raleigh City Market
I&O @ Duke Gardens
Orn @ Duke Gardens
Inna @ Duke Gardens
At Duke Gardens
Fri March 15: Raleigh
After the usual preliminaries, we spent the day checking out Raleigh.
On the way into town, we visited the suburban local office of Inna's employer, which was small and focused on client-specific project work, which isn’t ideal for Inna.
We drove to Raleigh's surprisingly small downtown, checking out their visitors' bureau and a cool co-op called Artspace. We walked through City Market, picked up lunch (pizza & salad and ziti arrabiata) at Vic's Ristorante, got a toy for Begemot at a pet store called Unleashed, and chatted with Melinda, the proprietor of the Devilish Egg art studio and store and owner of Rollo the Maine Coon.
Then we drove around at random, scoping out the surrounding neighborhoods. I chatted with a guy at the Oak City Cycling Project about local events and riding conditions. On the way back to Durham, I stopped by the Raleigh storefront of Bicycle Chain (a Specialized and Cannondale dealer) and met Steve, their local road cycling guru.
After ice cream at Ben & Jerry's at NSCU, we had dinner (shrimp & grits and chicken fingers) at Tyler's Taproom in Durham's old American Tobacco factory, right across from the unavoidable Durham Bulls' baseball park.
After finding the AirBnB's antique bed painfully soft, Inna dragged out a futon and slept on that. After two days of delightful temps in the 70s, a cold front passed through overnight, and the rest of our stay would feature chillier high temps around 50°.
Sat March 16: Kyudo, Durham
Saturday morning Inna stayed home while I drove down toward Apex to visit Meishin Kyudojo, a kyudo practice facility run by Dan DeProspero, a well-known teacher and author of "Kyudo: The Essence and Practice of Japanese Archery", which remains virtually the only English-language history and instruction manual for kyudo.
Dan and his half-dozen hakama-wearing practitioners gave me a warm welcome before beginning their outdoor practice in the 40° cold. The group seemed friendly, personable, and serious about the kyudo form and taking time getting people started with it. After three years in Pittsburgh without any kyudo, it was a delight to see people practicing, and I left the dojo feeling energized.
I had hoped to drop in on a practice session by Triangle Taiko, but they hadn't replied to my earlier email. Instead, I drove toward bland, manicured suburb Cary and stopped at Cycling Spoken Here, which turned out to be the local Trek bike dealer, where another guy described the local road scene.
Returning to the house, I picked up Inna, who wanted to crash a book club Meetup to chat with random people. So we went to the New World Cafe in a strip mall off Glenwood in Raleigh, where we met a handful of people and asked them questions about how they liked the area.
Afterward, we drove around the surrounding neighborhoods, then more residential areas around Durham before lunch at Maverick's Taproom. Then window shopping around Brightleaf Square and a stop at Durham Cycles, where the guy mentioned talking earlier in the day to another couple of Pittsburghers who were also looking to move south.
After three full days of driving, walking, planning, and comparing notes, we were drained and headed home for a quiet evening.
Sun March 17: Chapel Hill & Carrboro
Sunday's plan was Chapel Hill and Carrboro. We parked right at the main square and walked down Franklin Street, the four-lane main drag filled with newish retail buildings.
Passing into Carrboro, the streetscape became more shabby, with a small-town feel. We stopped at a couple artsy shops, the Clean Machine bike shop, and caught a local cover band playing a Daft Punk cover outside a BBQ joint. On the way back to the car, we stopped at Carolina Brewery, a generic sports bar where I had an interesting potato chip “nachos" with jalapenos on top.
Then we drove through the surrounding residential neighborhoods and UNC. We hit a grocery store and got makings for supper, but returned to the Parlour in Durham for pre-dinner dessert (where I was double-charged for our ice cream).
Mon March 18: Triangle Insight & Durham
Despite fatigue, I was up before 6am Monday for a morning meditation at Triangle Insight. I walked into the Duke Episcopal Center early and had to turn on the lights and wait for the organizers to show up.
Naturally, a 7am weekday sitting only drew a handful of people, but the leader-Ron Vereen-said their evening sessions draw 40-50 people. It’s an active community with Kalyana Mitta groups and connections with the Eno River Buddhist Community and New Hope Sangha. Ron had studied with familiar teachers including CIMC's Narayan and Rodney Smith. After a hectic few days, it was nice to just sit for 45 minutes.
On the way home, I refueled the car at an unexpectedly familiar convenience store: a Western Pennsylvania-based Sheetz.
Our next outing was checking out Research Triangle Park, which was underwhelming. Most of it was inaccessible due to security, but what we saw looked like any other suburban office park.
Then we went back to the Duke campus to walk the Duke Gardens, especially their asiatic arboretum, where the sakura blossoms were out. That reminded me that a year earlier I’d been at Tokyo’s Narita airport, where the runways had been lined with blossoming cherry trees. That in turn reminded me that Dan DeProspero had established his kyudo dojo in Raleigh because it was the closest he could get in the US to Tokyo’s climate. It felt like spring, as the park’s ducks demonstrated in flagrante delicto.
In downtown Durham we checked out a couple co-working spaces, including cause célèbre WeWork. Then a brief tour of artsy Hotel 21C Museum before unpretentious food at Elmo's Diner. Then home to run a laundry and prepare for the following day.
Tue March 19: To Charlotte
Packed up, closed the AirBNB, and began the 2½-hour drive to Charlotte.
Partway there, we decided to spend some unplanned time in Greensboro to avoid a 90-minute backup on I-85. We hit a Gabe’s discount store, then a bad lunch at Friday’s.
Got back on the highway and into our small NoDa AirBNB with no delays. We checked out a couple shops on Davidson Street, then grabbed groceries and had a quiet evening settling in.
Wed March 20: Charlotte
Began the day walking to the Smelly Cat Coffee House to meet up with Daniel, a local cyclist I knew from the online community on Zwift, to pick his brain about Charlotte.
His take was that it’s a small city that’s growing quickly, absorbing transplants that cause suburban sprawl and property rates to go up, and crowding out its former eclectic quality. The financial industry are the dominant employers. He said point-blank he hated living there.
We wandered around Uptown, checking the visitors’ center and Inna’s employer’s office. Then around the residential neighborhoods, poking into artsy shops like Paper Skyscraper, where I bought the book “Mindful Thoughts for Cyclists”. A few cycling questions at Uptown Cycles, a meatball sub at Pizza Peel, and back to the house.
I left Inna and drove to a Baptist church in Myers Park to check out the Insight Meditation Community of Charlotte. I sat in on an orientation with three newcomers, led by teacher Debbie George, another former student of CIMC’s Larry Rosenberg. Then joined 50 people for a sitting and dhamma talk about wise speech and lovingkindness. Afterward, I connected with their treasurer, Adrienne Price, who had-like me-studied at the Bhavana Society, and was headed for a retreat at the nearby Southern Dharma Retreat Center. I again enjoyed connecting with people based on common friends and frames of reference.
Thu March 21: Home!
We packed and left the house at 10:30am, but made a lengthy and agreeable stop at Amelie's patisserie for macarons and a ham & gruyere croissant.
The more-inland drive from sunny North Carolina back into the March gloom of Western Pennsylvania was hillier and more scenic than our previous coastal route, with less traffic and fewer towns. We landed weary and happy to be home, catching our cat-sitting friends at the house when we arrived. Job done!
Overall Impressions
My general impression of the area was positive. So far as I could tell from a brief visit, the climate seems wonderful, and the people seemed intelligent, friendly, and enthusiastically welcoming.
Triangle Insight seemed like a well-established group, and the presence of a long-running kyudo dojo is a big plus. Although I didn’t get a feel for the local roads, there seem to be plenty of cycling organizations and events.
The job market is a big questionmark, and in such a widely-dispersed area we’d need two cars, although those are concerns anywhere we'd consider moving.
The area is booming, with lots of transplants fleeing the cold. That comes with downsides like increasing housing costs, and the towns haven’t planned or created the infrastructure to cope with such growth.
A big concern was Inna’s reaction; having mostly grown up in the northeast, she'd expected a more walkable and multicultural urban feel, rather than strip malls and suburban neighborhoods of detached single-family homes. Disappointingly, that’s pretty common in the absence of any natural constraints on sprawl.
Looking at the individual towns, Raleigh had a slightly artsy feel and enthusiastically friendly people, but a tiny central business district surrounded by nondescript residential developments. It felt more like a small town than a big city.
Durham is a reluctantly gentrifying working-class ghetto, with boarded-up buildings and a run-down, abandoned feel. While there were a couple small, funky-feeling areas that we felt comfortable in, even our AirBNB had reviews from renters who had felt unsafe in the ratty town.
Then there’s Chapel Hill, a college town that’s home to UNC. A spacious, affluent commercial drag with the usual soulless upscale chain stores, and again immediately backed up by suburban-style neighborhoods.
And separately, Charlotte, which had a more familiar urban center and funky mixed-use neighborhoods such as our temporary home in NoDa. But it seemed to lack character or much to recommend it beyond its rep as a big banking hub.
So from a scouting standpoint, we returned to Pittsburgh frustrated and disillusioned: Inna because she’d expected something very different, and me because of her feelings. It’s unfortunate and saddens me, because the area seems to meet my requirements well. But our challenge is to figure out how to maximize happiness for both of us, despite our conflicting preferences.