Putting A Little Spring in Our Step... in Chapel Hill

Our family visited the North Carolina Botanical Gardens in Chapel Hill this week, which are owned by UNC.  The university's botany students maintain and do research in the gardens, which are free and open to the public.  It's definitely a relaxing way to pass an afternoon...

Anna Jean was by far the most excited of the five of us about the flowers.  She danced and smelled her way  up and down and through the paths.  And when she finished, she had a tell-tale sign of having dipped her nose in some springtime...

There were times that I fully expected Peter Rabbit or Benjamin Bunny to jump out and say "hello" to us!  The Botanical Gardens look like a page out of a Beatrix Potter book...

The yummiest part of the gardens were the herb gardens.  With so many herbs growing together, when the wind blew just right it smelled like something was cooking.  In the picture below, John walks beside a bay bush:  those are bay leaves like we put in Italian recipes.

And in the herb garden, the students had decorated a tree with kitchen utensils.  Cute.

 But one of the coolest things that the UNC students had done was to create a giant chess board out of spray-painted pots and garden equipment.  They even let visitors play!

 The "poison plants" section contained a few too many itchy plants for my comfort.  Yes, they intentionally grow poison ivy in there, I suppose in the name of research.  I walked in to take this picture and then skeedaddled right back out...

The Paul Green Cabin had been located to the Botanical Gardens in the 1990's.  Paul Green is a Pulitzer-Prize winning North Carolina author.  He wrote a book about the Lost Colony, which was later made into a play in Manteo in the Outer Banks.

The boys had a fun time looking for plant markers that had funny names:

  And John posed proudly beside a buckeye tree.  Having once been one.

(A Buckeye...not a tree. :D)

And with Tim being Tim, he couldn't leave without finding a 3' black snake, who happily smiled for a picture.  (I think that little guy is smiling....but then again I could be wrong.)

 One of the restaurants I had always wanted to try in Chapel Hill was the famous Mama Dip's.  Mama Dip's serves classic southern cuisine: it was named the 2nd best restaurant in the South in 2009 and was the feature of an article in Southern Living magazine in 2011.  Tim had fried chicken and pinto beans.  I had salmon cake and turnip greens.  The best thing Mama Dip's serves, though, has to be their mac and cheese.  Yum.

We couldn't slip out of Chapel Hill without swinging by Duke University over in Durham and saying hello to the Blue Devils.  

And that's how we "got our spring on" this week.

Welcome Spring!

Eastern North Carolina is dressing-up in her finest attire to welcome the much-anticipated return of spring.  All over our neighborhood, the flowers and bushes are in full-bloom...giving praise to their Creator and joy to those who pass by.

It's spring! Farewell

     To chills and colds!
     The blushing, girlish
     World unfolds
Each flower, leaf
     And blade of sod—
     Small letters sent
     To her from God.
~John Updike

Our family feels mighty happy to be outside feeling the warm sun and breathing the fresh air again...

Here's a little song for all of us who have had 

a "long, cold, lonely winter..."

OBX

Well, it was certainly an adventure for the Barnette Five on the Outer Banks today, as we trekked the two hours over to Nags Head and soaked-up some sun.

Stop #1: Jockey's Ridge State Park.

The last time Tim and I had been to Jockey's Ridge, we were newly married without any children yet.  So it was super fun revisiting and showing the kids the largest sand dunes on the Eastern side of North America. 

Although we had come with grand aspirations of flying kites, our hopes were defeated when the winds wouldn't pick-up (although they would pick-up mightily later in the day).  Try as he might, Tim just couldn't get a kite to fly.  But our disappointment probably paled in comparison with...

...the disappointment of all the folks who had paid money for lessons but couldn't get their hang-gliders off the ground! :(

 "It's like a desert!" Christopher said. 

He was a big fan of the dunes...

 Even the fact that he had to climb back up the soft sand couldn't sway Christopher's love of the dunes.

Stop #2: we had to stop at North Carolina's COOLEST shop:

 This one (below) was my favorite in the store.  A hammock in perpetual shade.

And of course we HAD to take a walk on the pier. 

 It's a Barnette Family Tradition.

Stop #3: Jeanette's Pier

Interesting how we saw the island working to fix its sand erosion/dispersion problem.  There were areas like this one right beside the pier where the sand was piling-up, at times covering stairways and decks; but at other parts of beach, dump trucks were bringing in sand to fill in holes and gaps on the beach. 

 While we were walking the pier the wind really picked-up.  

We thought we were going to get blown away...as Christopher demonstrated.  Ha!

Below, John does his "I caught a fish THIS BIG" pose under a replica of one of the largest sharks ever caught on the Outer Banks.  Look closely at John's favorite t-shirt - which he was wearing today just like he does everyday - and you can tell that John loves sharks.  Makos like this one are one of his favorite kinds.

Stop #3: Miller's Waterfront Restaurant

We tried this new seafood restaurant on this trip, and it turned-out to be a hit.  I had an absolutely awesome lobster roll, and Tim....to no one's surprise....found the "Simply Fried" section of the menu.

Besides the good seafood, one of the cooler things about Miller's Restaurant was its beautiful view of the Pamlico Sound.  We had so much fun watching the kite boarders on the sound fly across the water and sometimes even into the air.

On the drive back home on 64, we took a turn onto the Charles Kuralt Trail, just on a whim because it looked interesting.  Turned-out to be a pretty cool little drive...

 We got to watch a muskrat swim and we counted dozens of turtles.

 Tim found a cottonmouth (water mocassin) sunning itself in the road that he kindly relocated out of harm's way.   I think Mr. Cottonmouth told Tim "thank you." :)

But our big excitement came when we were exiting the Charles Kuralt Trail and out of nowhere a black bear came out of the roadside canal and ran across the road right infront of us!  Tim actually had to hit the breaks and turn the wheel to avoid hitting the bear.  I couldn't grab my camera quick enough to snap a shot of the bear, but you can see the water trail it left.  We had heard that the Outer Banks had bears, and now we've seen it for ourselves.

Thanks, Lord, for a great day on the Banks!