Exploring Our Area--Hot And Humid Summer Edition.

Summer in North Carolina is beautiful! Yes, it's scorching hot and humid and it's hard to be outside for a long period of time, but it almost feels like a very-very long vacation! It doesn't rain often and if it does it's usually a thunderstorm.

It also seems that summer weather starts in May. That is the reason our neighborhood swimming pool opens middle of May!




We do try to take advantage of nice weather and explore outside. We managed to go several times to the beach trying out different locations. One of the weekends when the Grovers came to visit us we drove to Fort Fisher beach and then stopped by Carolina beach for some famous Britts donuts and barbeque.

We are learning about all types of slow cooked bbq meet in different areas of NC.

We also explored on our own with the kids. One day we ventured out to Raleigh to look for a sunflower field that "things you didn't know exist" type of blog posted about. Well, it said it was only a mile and a half away from parking, but turned out to be way further away. The kids were on scooters but I was running, in that heat...we didn't make it to the real sunflower field, apparently, as we got too hot and tired and knew we still had to somehow get back to the car. We just snapped a couple of pictures with Katya here.

One day we went to Durham. I planned a short itinerary of places I wanted to see up there. 

We started with Duke Homestead State Historic Site, which is a small museum about the history of tobacco in the area as well as an exhibit of an old tobacco farm. It was the first time we actually went 

The best part of the outing was stopping by this French cafe that was in a very random place near the Duke Homestead State Historic Site. The kids got some French treats. 

 

Then we drove to downtown Durham for some ice cream. 

And finally we stopped by the Duke Gardens. These kids totally fell out of habit of exploring...

I only managed to convince these three to spend like thirty minutes at Duke Gardens. They were whiny and not cooperating with my adventurous mood!:)

It's pretty and all, so I don't know what their deal was. We must go back there!!!

I really do feel like I need to be more organized about our excursions. We simply got out of our groove of traveling. My new goal is to find some local gems that will be as exciting to visit as some of the ones in Misawa and around Alconbury.

Lyana.