Carolina in my mind!

While living in the United States I’ve come around quite a lot – I saw pretty much all the big cities on the West Coast (I’ll write about this trip pretty soon) and have also been to some of the most popular cities on the East Coast, like Boston, NYC, Baltimore and Washington D.C.But since most of you probably know quite a lot about those cities already, I don’t want to write about them today. I’d like to tell you what to do in a “not so popular” State – North Carolina.

When I first read that my future host family lives in Raleigh, I was like ”Raleigh? Where the heck is that?”. Of course I wanted, like all the other Au Pairs, to go to a breathtaking city like NYC, LA or Chicago. But after skyping with my host family I just knew that I’d get along with the kids and my host parents very well and decided that being with a nice family was more important than living in an amazing city.

Afterwards I was and still am more than happy about my decision – I had the best host family ever and North Carolina has actually many interesting places/cities to visit. Some of them are:

Wilmington or “Little Hollywood”

One of the cutest and nicest towns I’ve ever been to – I loved it from the beginning. If you visit Wilmington you can combine it with a trip to the beach: Wrightsville Beach (my favorite), Carolina Beach and Kure Beach are all pretty close. Wilmington has a couple of tourist attractions like the battleship “USS North Carolina (BB-55)", which is open to public tours, a couple of museums and of course you can visit downtown Wilmington with its many shops, restaurants and historical buildings. Wilmington has its own University, UNC Wilmington, and the probably most interesting fact about Wilmington is that it is the home of the “EUE Screen Gems Studios”, which are the largest television and movie production facility outside of California. More than 350 productions come from the studio, like “One Tree Hill”, “Dawson’s Creek”, “Little Britain USA”, “Nights in Rodanthe” (based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks) and “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island”. Parts of “Iron Man 3”, which will be released this year, were also filmed there. The Wilmington tourist information offers special tours (or just maps which show you the most important places) of some of the movies/shows – a friend of mine and I followed the “One Tree Hill path” and we saw all the important places like “Tree Hill High School”, the billiard pub where Brooke and Lucas get drunk, River Court, Karen’s Café and so on.

New Bern

New Bern is the second oldest town of North Carolina and also home of “Pepsi Cola”. You can visit the drugstore where it was developed and first sold and you can enjoy an “original” Pepsi for less than a Dollar! You can also see the first Capitol of NC, “Tryon Palace”, which is really beautiful. But that’s not why we went there – we were hoping to meet Nicholas Sparks (I know, we are freaks ;)), because he lives in New Bern, and his novel “The Notebook” is set there. Unfortunately it didn’t work out, but we still had a wonderful day.

 

 

Beaufort & Southport

Beaufort & Southport are also little historical towns/cities in North Carolina. As you can probably guess we went there because of some novels by Nicholas Sparks. Beaufort is small – well, to be honest, it’s tiny – but beautiful, and Southport has the biggest 4th of July parade of NC. Parts of “Dawson’s Creek”, “I Know What You Did Last Summer”, "A Walk to Remember”, “Safe Haven” and many other movies were filmed in Southport, and Oak Island, a really beautiful beach, is only 20 minutes away.

    

The Great Smoky Mountains

The border between Tennessee and North Carolina runs through this National Park, so not all its beauty “belongs” to North Carolina, but it’s definitely worth a visit. The Great Smoky Mountains are part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which belong to the Appalachian Mountain chain (and thanks to our last exam we all know where the Appalachian Mountains are ;)). The highest point with 6.643 feet (2.025 meters) is at the summit of “Clingmans Dome”. The park has a number of historical attractions and a beautiful waterfall, there are many possibilities to go hiking and you can go fishing and horseback riding. At the entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park you can find a town called Cherokee. There are many museums, where you can learn about the history of the Cherokee Indian Tribe, and you can find some shops where you can buy typical jewelry and crafts.

 

There are many other places in North Carolina which are worth visiting, like Charlotte, Asheville and so on, but the ones I mentioned above are my favorites. So if you ever get the chance to visit and explore North Carolina, just give it a try. Of course it’s gonna be something completely different than visiting NYC or LA, but it can be really nice to enjoy some nature and some beautiful and historical towns for a change :)

(source: Wikipedia & own experiences)