We took two days to drive home from Hilton Head, stopping in Raleigh and spending the night at the Oakwood Inn. The Inn was (apparently) the first bed and breakfast in the city, and is located in the historic Oakwood neighborhood. The neighborhood has its own very nicely published walking tour guide to the homes, and we enjoyed reading about the places we passed when we hoofed it to and from dinner. Raleigh is not that big; we were planning to take the new circulator bus back to the Inn later in the evening, but just ended up walking everywhere. Years in Ann Arbor and DC without a car, where we regularly walked several miles a night when we went out, trained us well.
Our choice for dinner was The Raleigh Times, a local bar that’s located in the former offices of one of Raleigh’s now-defunct newspapers. It was spacious, well-designed, and played good music. Also, the guacamole and sangria was just as good as I’d been told it would be, which is always nice. We hung out there for a while, and then headed over to check out the live jazz place (the name of which I forget). Sadly, the band wasn’t going on for another hour—it was Saturday night, after all—and we weren’t up for making a night of it, even with the Irish bar right next door. Honestly, the live act at the Irish bar was a little off-putting: I’m sure they were a fine band, but their attempts to turn ‘Whiskey In a Jar’ into a sing-a-long about tequila were not what we were looking for. Instead, we walked back, past the statehouse and the Governor’s mansion, and stood under the streetlights to read the descriptions of houses we found interesting. We happened to be there on the weekend of the annual garden tour, so everyone’s yards and porches were looking particularly spiffy.
Before leaving Raleigh we were hoping to visit the Seagrove Pottery shop, however the hours didn’t work out. We did peer in the window and admire the lovely large pitchers and bowls; in terms of our vacation budget, it’s probably best they weren’t open. (Ditto with the totally funky bag shop in downtown Raleigh.) From there, we headed north on local roads so that my partner could get a sense of my experience riding my bike from Raleigh to DC six years ago. The plan was to stop for lunch in Warrenton, the town that threw the AIDS riders a welcome party at the end of our first day. Although I wasn’t able to recreate the route exactly, we had fun, and we did get lunch as planned. Warrenton was as I remembered it; everyone was perfectly friendly, although we felt a bit out of place in our casual traveling outfits as everyone was kitted out in their church outfits. In the end, we ate at the more casual Italian restaurant, taking half of our meals home to have for dinner. In Warrenton, we experienced one of the more surreal elements of town squares in the South, the Confederate War memorials. Nearly every town of any size has one (Raleigh did), but not necessarily a memorial for any other wars. (And, yes, it’s true that many towns in northern states have Civil War memorials, and it’s also true that in the end all of those dead soldiers were of the same nation. Maybe I’ll feel better about it when we have a national African-American history museum and/or a monument to the slave dead. Recognition of the existing African-American Civil War Memorial, right around the corner from where we used to live in DC, would be a great start.) All that being said, the fact that North Carolina voters chose both Kay Hagan and the prez went a long way toward our greater ease there than in rural South Carolina (where mostly we saw signs protesting incorporation of county land into towns and bumper stickers encouraging tax resistance evasion).
From Warrenton, we bid the Carolinas goodbye, hopped on the highway, and cruised home. Well, we didn’t exactly cruise; we got back off the highway and toodled half of the way through Virginia on Route 1 because it was moving more quickly. (Wow, Virginia! Your traffic is nuts! So glad I don’t live there!) They say the sign of a good vacation is when you’re happy to go and happy to return, and we were certainly both.