Staying with Friends: On the Porch in Raleigh, North Carolina

by Paul Brady on


One thing you won’t find in New York City, at least at my apartment, is a screened-in porch. But in the summer in the south, the porch is the living room, kitchen, dining room and bar, a focal point of a home to rival the greatest of fireplaces. I know because I had the pleasure of enjoying a porch for a couple of days recently in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Through my friend Rob, I’d met Tim and Susan, a couple that left New York City after about fifteen years to slow down and try their hands in the south. Like our friends in the Outer Banks, they were standard bearers for North Carolina’s wonderful brand of hospitality, immediately shuffling us out to the porch, plopping us down in chairs and handing us frosty beers plucked from an ice chest. One of the greatest things in North Carolina is the beer-filled cooler that holds a prime position on porches across the state.

We talked. Rob updated his friends on news from New York and I grilled the couple on life in Raleigh and how it compares to the north, particularly because Tim will soon open his own bar near the campus of UNC. “The bottom line is, with Research Triangle Park, there is this really well-educated community and an awfully diverse community here,” he says. “My thing is that there’s a phenomenal number of ‘classic American’ bars but there aren’t really a phenomenal number of bars that have been influenced by Europe. And it’s not that I want to create a ‘European bar’ but there are a lot of things that the Europeans get right with bars,” like lighting, music, ambiance and drink selection.

Tim’s new spot should be, like his porch, a great place for gathering. The idea of televisions in pubs is repellant to the long-time bartender, a pointless intrusion on the real reasons for going out: the people and the booze and sometimes the food. Construction at his place is still underway, but he’s already found that the business of building a restaurant in Chapel Hill is, in many ways, much easier here than in New York City. Rent is cheaper, of course, but so are construction costs, contracting fees and permits. Bureaucratic headaches are nothing compared to what restaurant owners confront up north. It’s the kind of place, says Tim, where he can actually open his own business; that wasn’t a certainty in his former hometown. (He also has more room in his house for power tools now.)

Critically for the area restaurant scene-if not his place-the local products are good, says Tim: “There is some very good beer being brewed in North Carolina. I was shocked to say so when I moved but there’s some fabulous beer being brewed down here.” Lonerider’s Shotgun Betty and Foothills Pilsner from Salem, North Carolina are a couple of his favorites. 3 Cups, a Chapel Hill gourmet shop, stocks plenty of international groceries and wines, but its event program is all about local chefs and farmers. “There is good food here,” Tim says. Much of it is on view at the Raleigh Farmers Market, which has so much to offer that it’s open daily.

While his future bar is across “The Triangle” from the capital, Raleigh’s downtown alliance is encouraging development in the heart of the city, where there’s already a healthy dining and nightlife scene. Poole’s Diner is a foodie favorite occupying a restored luncheonette, bustling until the wee hours as friends finish that last bottle of wine and linger over dessert. The chef there, Ashley Christensen, is embarking on a new triple-concept restaurant, adding to the offerings in downtown with Beasley’s, Chuck’s and an as-yet-unnamed bar. It’s not just eating and drinking: The Contemporary Art Museum opened earlier this year in a converted warehouse on West Martin Street.

The nerve center of it all is Morning Times, a killer coffee shop where friends bump into friends by coincidence and everyone seems to greet the baristas by name. Tables line the street, occupied by couples reading the paper and neighbors “visiting,” that southern form of chatting that makes a conversation much more than just small talk. There are salads and sandwiches and wraps to order, sure, but the egg and cheese biscuit is what you really want for breakfast (and probably lunch too).

For all the positives, development work continues, as The Raleigh Connoisseur blog, which tracks downtown news and notes, describes in its mission statement:

Transit, urban planning, and land use are new problems that we will face as the city grows. What will downtown’s role be in all of this? I am trying to follow Raleigh’s attempts at bringing back the urban center it once had in the early 1900s.

Indeed, in this growing city and metro region, sprawl could be public enemy number one, with engineers commuting to RTP, suburbanites driving downtown for a night out or an entrepreneurial bartender living in Raleigh opening his place in Chapel Hill. All the driving makes economic sense now, but will it still as the population continues to grow-and gas prices keep rising?

Six Reasons to Love the Outer Banks

by Paul Brady on


You’ve seen the stickers. White ovals, with the trio of letters “OBX,” an American riff on European nationality decals, they’re a sign of allegiance to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I always found them annoying: How could some mid-Atlantic beach really be that wonderful? And why would you want to brag about your vacation on the back of your car?

Turning onto the beach road in Kill Devil Hills, with the dunes to my left, houses on stilts looking out over the water and kids slowly pedaling cruiser bikes, the reason became apparent. The Outer Banks are so wonderful, you can’t help but evangelize on their behalf. Here are six reasons why.

Traveling the American Road – Exploring the Birthplace of Aviation


The history: This is where aviation got its start, when Orville and Wilbur Wright finally got their Flyer into the air for a series of short trips on December 17, 1903. The site, commonly called Kitty Hawk but now in the incorporated city of Kill Devil Hills, is a protected national memorial, administered by the National Park Service. For just $4 a person, you can run along the actual path of the first powered flights in human history. Wilbur’s longest ride lasted 59 seconds; it took me 48 seconds to run the 852 feet.

The beach: It’s not the widest beach I’ve ever seen, but the Outer Banks offers miles of uninterrupted strands along the Atlantic. Because the barrier islands here are so narrow, you’re never more than a few minutes from the water. Don’t leave your rental house or hotel without a swimsuit.

The lighthouses: For a place known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic for all its shipwrecks, there are plenty of lighthouses to see. The most famous is on Cape Hatteras, a black-and-white tower that tops 200 feet. It’s open for climbs in season, as are others like the Currituck Beach and Ocracoke lighthouses.

The activities: One reason the Wright Brothers chose the Outer Banks for their experiments in flight is the area’s consistent ocean breezes. Those same winds make for excellent kite surfing, parasailing and even hang gliding. Kitty Hawk Kites is the leader in teaching visitors to hang glide in a single day at Jockey’s Ridge State Park, where sand dunes provide soft landings for students.

The people: I was fortunate enough to stay with the parents of a friend of a friend, a family that’s lived in Kill Devil Hills for 31 years. In a house built on stilts, and listing slightly from hurricane damage, my hosts shared stories of the place and its cast of characters-over beers pulled from an ice-filled cooler on their screened-in porch. For dinner, soft-shell crabs were fried in a pot of hot oil and served along side the best fried green tomatoes I’ve ever tasted. When I said I couldn’t thank them enough for the hospitality, they asked why I couldn’t just stay another night.

The ring toss: My hosts introduced me to ring toss. It’s not the carnival game but a test of dexterity that involves swinging a small metal loop tied to a string across the lawn to a hook mounted on a tree. It’s by turns infuriating and magical and maddeningly addictive. I’d seen it once before, in Maine, but not with the ubiquity it has in the Outer Banks. A trip here without it wouldn’t be complete.

The Ultimate Road Trip Detour: Go Kart Racing?

by Paul Brady on


At the outset of this road trip, I invited friends and readers to jump in the car with me. After more than a month on the road, one of my buddies finally took me up on the offer, planning to meet me in Virginia Beach after I toured Colonial Williamsburg.

I’ve known Rob for more than 10 years, and while we get along wonderfully, we love competition. So it being a road trip, there was no better place to spar than on a go kart track.

Traveling the American Road – Go Kart Racing


By a fantastic coincidence, Virginia Beach Motor World has a loop inspired by Watkins Glen International, a place I’d visited earlier this summer–and driven on the pro-level track. It wasn’t an exact replica, but I planned to put some of my driving experience in Upstate New York to good use in Virginia.

Rob and I have raced before, in Chile of all places, in super-speedy karts that required helmets. Splitting a few races this time around, we still haven’t determined a champion. We’re hoping to do that when we get to the Orlando Kart Center. But first we have a stop to make in the Outer Banks.

Inside STS135: The Experience at the Final Shuttle Launch

by Paul Brady on


I got to William J. Menzo Park in Titusville at about 3 am, in a bad mood and not sure if the shuttle would even launch. NASA said the odds for departure were only 30 percent. But until NASA officially scrubbed the Friday morning liftoff, I’d be here, set up in a tent with provisions packed in a Styrofoam cooler I’d just bought.

The shuttle’s been ferrying people to space for just a few more years than I’ve been alive–and today’s mission was my last chance to see the space ship of my generation.


It’s a logistical nightmare, seeing a launch. There’s no certainty the weather will cooperate, as I and a reported one million other spectators know all too well. Hotels in Titusville and along the Space Coast charge incredible prices, which isn’t exactly unfair–this is the hottest ticket in Florida!–but it does put rooms out of reach of many. And so we drive, in cars, in SUVs, in station wagons and RVs and camper vans with pop tops. Parked on sidewalks and lawns, along the sides of roads, there seems to be a suspension of rules.

It’s the same in the park, where according to a sign, there’s no overnight camping. (Broke that ordinance.) There’s also no alcohol without a permit. (Plenty of people not heeding that one.) The fires that were going last night must violate some rule, but I’m not sure which one. But there’s a singular focus here, and the only real crime would be to block someone’s tripod-mounted camera.

Lenses bristle along the coast, set up since the middle of the night to stake out an ideal vantage point. It’s an outlandish collection of gizmos–all manner of video recorders, lenses bigger than magnum wine bottles, boom mikes with wind screens–that reminds me that half the fun of space exploration is taking photos of what happens when we explore space.

With 56 minutes left until launch, a duo strums a guitar and plays a drum, while spectators smoke cigarettes out of habit or nervousness or need to do something, anything to pass the slowly ticking minutes. Kids are slathered with sunscreen and bug spray by parents who no doubt brought them so the youngsters could one day say they’d seen a shuttle launch. I wonder if they’ll even remember the experience, like many of my generation can only hazily remember the Challenger disaster, the defining public tragedy of our lives, at least through September 10, 2001.

With five minutes left to go, someone in the crowd shouts out “FIVE MINUTES.” We’re all excited, the atmosphere tense with the hope that we’ll see the launch but wary of a last-second call-off.

Two minutes. A duo of military fighter jets fly over, making a deafening racket, drowning out the sound of radios broadcasting the mission control chatter. Final camera checks are made.

We all hear the words “main engine start” at seven seconds and a tiny spark, 10 miles away but very distinct, appears. Breath is drawn. I don’t remember hearing the rest of the countdown.

A giant cloud of steam and exhaust explodes, silently because the sound hasn’t yet reached us, and Atlantis surges off the pad. We start clapping and cheering, with tunnel vision chasing the craft up into the low-hanging clouds that threatened the launch minutes before. After another minute–or what feels like a minute–the exhaust stream pokes out from a gap in the clouds, and we can see the shuttle again, already hundreds of miles away, tiny and flickering on its way to space. Applause goes up again, as those of us who see it point it out to those who don’t.

And then it’s gone.

Later, as the basso profundo of the rockets finally rolled across the water, I talked to Tim, a local construction worker who’s seen more than 100 launches, including the very first and today’s, the very last. It was a celebratory day, with our four astronauts on the way to orbit, and a sad day. It’s the end of the program, a retirement that Tim says will be “devastating” to the region. There were little kids running around, here for the last shuttle launch, but probably too young to ever fully remember it.

Colonial Williamsburg: Made in America

by Paul Brady on


The last time I visited Colonial Williamsburg, I was about half as tall as I am now. Would it still be worth seeing-or as fantastic as I remembered-now that I’m a grown up? I drove south from Washington, D.C. to find out, without doing a lick of planning or advance research. This would be a visit informed only by my fuzzy memories of hiking around in the heat and talking to people dressed in period costumes.

It turned out to be just as cool as I remembered, even if it was nearly 100 degrees.

Traveling the American Road – Colonial Williamsburg: Made in America


The city spans 301 acres, and it’s accurate to describe it as a village, since people actually live here around the clock. Staffers occupy buildings in the historic section and artisans working in Williamsburg create the tools, clothing and even beer that’s needed on site. While it sounds like a marketing line, it’s true that this place is much more than a theme park. It’s a sort of living museum, and what they’re preserving is the knowledge and history of small-scale American manufacturing and handicraft.

Take the milliner’s shop, where I met a tailor who’d been apprenticing for seven years, showing off a dress crafted in 60 hours of stitching. I learned about movable type from a printer, probably running one of the most profitable presses in the country, given the current state of publishing. A youngster was talking the trade with a blacksmith, the former an avid hobbyist in the art of mashing metals, picking up tips from the professional. A wheelwright described how to build an ox cart. (They can last years as long as you scoop the manure out and bring it in from the rain.)

As I’ve found stories of resurgent places, the made in America element of Williamsburg captivated me in its historic rather than innovative focus. In other words, there’s a difference between Korean tacos and hand-hammering a pewter cup. But by quietly building things by hand, the craftsmen and women of Williamsburg are doing something very, very cool-and something I didn’t have the chance to appreciate as a kid.