Ok, so when I say “North Carolina,” I suppose I mean two stops in addition to Asheville/Smokies and Boone: Winston-Salem and Raleigh. While we planned to keep heading North from Boone, into Virginia, DC, and beyond, we ended up changing our route due to a slight hiccup with nothing else but our grey and black tanks. Lucky for us, vaccinations could not have come at a more relevant time. We were overcome by the generosity and companionship of friends and family. Like a reunion as our world was just starting to open up, we broke bread, shared hugs, made new friendships (the kids) and rekindled others (the adults). While we had spent most of this trip in the woods or on the beach, going it alone, we now filled our cups with all that fills from relationship – sharing of triumphs and failures, discussing kids and their behaviors at weird ages, catching up on dramatic twists and turns of life, sharing and questioning wisdom, brainstorming possibility, and getting all the crazy stuff in our head out into the open to be vetted, refined, and shared.

• We stayed: driveways (I’ll be honest, five stars here, I love staying in driveways of the homes of people I love)
• We explored: friends and family’s backyards (there are still birds to name, sticks to whittle, and eggs to collect), Old Salem (the church where the Emancipation Proclamation was read)
• We ate: around friends’ dining room tables and in their backyards and porches (five stars!), but also Krankies (coffee) and Mojito (cuban sandwiches) in Winston-Salem.
• We drank: Wise Man Brewing (in Winston-Salem) and a friends’ homebrew