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Thursday, October 13, 2022

Fall Break 2022


Peter and Sarah were both on fall break Monday and Tuesday!  But did they rush home to be with their mother?

Um, that would be a big NO! But that's okay.  I always tell them that whenever they want to come home, they are welcome and they can stay for as long or as short as they want.  I am happy to get them whenever I can.

So Friday Sarah stayed at school to attend the Taylor Swift and Harry Styles Dance Party at a club in Charlotte and had a blast.  She sent me this cool picture of Charlotte all lit up pink for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.


 
Peter stayed in Raleigh and went with his fraternity (and another NC State frat and sorority) to UNC Chapel Hill to attend a mixer with some of the greeks from there.  He said he had a really good time. And then he stayed on Saturday to attend the NC State/FSU football game.  
 
Sarah came home on Saturday and immediately went to Kernersville to meet a friend for lunch.  She made it home in time to join us for Mass.

Peter came home on Sunday in time for lunch at Mom's and then we went to Walgreens for our flu shots. (Hmmmm...and I wonder why the kids don't want to spend all their time with me.)

Dan and Peter and I spent the rest of Sunday watching football while Sarah met the Basement in Kernersville.  They golfed 9 holes and had dinner together.  (And for the record, I think Sarah mostly drove the golf cart but she said she did hit some balls.)

Dan decided to take Monday off since the kids were home.  We drove to Asheville and had lunch at Pack's Tavern. It was really good.  


Then we walked around downtown Asheville before heading to Chimney Rock












The views were gorgeous and we had a really nice afternoon here and then headed home.  After dinner, Sarah hung out with Cheyanne and Dan, Peter, and I watched more football.

On Tuesday, Peter had lunch with Colton and got his hair cut and Sarah hung out with one of her friends all afternoon.  Then they both headed back to their respective schools and Dan and I went to the park to walk two miles. And just like that, fall break was over.

And yes, I'm already looking forward to Thanksgiving break when I will get to see both of them again!

Tuesday, October 4, 2022

UNC Charlotte Parents Weekend...sort of...

 This past weekend was supposed to be Parents Weekend at UNC Charlotte. But on Wednesday they postponed it until November due to Hurricane Ian.  While Charlotte was only supposed to get heavy rain and high winds the school felt it better to postpone due to all the uncertainty. The football game, was still going to be played but all of the other weekend events would be postponed.

We were only planning on attending the football game but since we (well, me and Sarah) didn't really want to sit out in the rain watching a football game, we decided to just transfer our tickets to the November game. But, because our hotel reservation was non-refundable, we decided to go to Charlotte and spend some time with her on Saturday and Sunday anyway.

Since we weren't bound by any kind of schedule, we got to Charlotte around 2:00 and Sarah met us at our hotel which was just a few minutes from campus.  We loaded ourselves and a small vacuum into her car and went to her dorm.  Sarah had asked me to bring the small vacuum down.  She has a broom but sometimes you just need to run the vacuum. :)

We then headed to the light rail station on campus and hoped the train the uptown Charlotte.  


The light rail in Charlotte didn't open until 2007 (which was the year after we left Charlotte) and this was our first time on it. It's so convenient that Sarah can just hope on it (for free) from campus and go uptown. 

We walked around uptown for a good hour and a half before Mass at St. Peter Catholic Church. Just before our visit to Charlotte, I was talking to Dan about the memorial brick a friend of mine had placed for Rebecca in a park near her home uptown.  Dan had never seen it and I've only seen it once, right after it was placed.  Since we had lots of time to walk around downtown, we decided to find the park.  We found it and we found the stone!  Dan was so glad we were able to find it because he really wanted to see it.

St. Peter Catholic Church was founded in 1851 and is the oldest Catholic church in Charlotte.  Also, as I was reading the history of the church I learned that St. Katharine Drexel was an early benefactor of  St. Peter and donated pews.  She founded Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Black and Native American peoples. Her gift of pews to the parish was contingent on a promise that they would be reserved for the “colored” people, in fulfillment of her order’s mission. 

Fun fact: the morning after our wedding, Dan and I, and his whole family attended mass at St. Peter's but we had not been back since. (We were married at St. Patrick's but St. Peter's was within walking distance of our hotel.)

After Mass, we headed to Tupelo Honey for dinner.  It was soooooo good.  I got the Roast Beef Debris.  It was roast beef served over goat cheese heirloom grits with braised green beans, green tomato salsa, fried onions and fresh cilantro and it was delicious!  


After dinner we hoped on the light rail and headed back to our hotel.  There was a stop right near where we stayed so it was super convenient. We watched the NC State football game and sadly they lost to Clemson.  We were pulling for the Wolfpack but they fell short.

Peter and his friends had fun as well.  They set up a projector under a tent  outside so they could all watch together and they had a bonfire too!


We slept in on Sunday morning which was so nice!  Check out at our hotel wasn't until Noon so that was a plus.

Sarah has tickets to a Harry Styles and Taylor Swift Dance Party on Friday night at a club in Charlotte. She's very excited about it but I'm not sure exactly what it is.  It sounds like they will be playing only Harry Styles and Taylor Swift music and there will be photo booths, a costume contest, lip syncing, etc.  She's very excited but she wasn't exactly sure where it was. So we drove to the venue and there is a light rail stop steps away. So now she knows where she's going and which station to get off the train at.  She's going with one of her new friends. I'm hoping she sends me a picture of two of the fun.

We then had lunch at Zapata's.  Zapata's is an old favorite restaurant of ours. We hadn't been in years so we were excited to take Sarah there.  After lunch we dropped Sarah back off at her dorm and said our goodbyes.



Dan and I then found the place we used to work (it has since been sold and ultimately closed) and we checked out one of his old apartments and one of mine. It was a nice little walk down memory lane.  The 90's feel like just yesterday to me but they were so long ago. While our old apartments looked basically the same from the outside, the building where we used to work looked so run down and old.It has not been well taken care of.

Part of me wishes we hadn't seen it because now that's in my memory as well as the way it looked back in it's glory days.  Charlotte has grown so much in the past 30 years and as we were driving around our old stomping grounds, we couldn't help but notice how much everything  has changed.  It was looking going on a scavenger hunt trying to find buildings that I vividly remember because now they are surrounded by so many other new (new to me) buildings and were almost unrecognizable. 

It was a nice 24 hours with our girl.  She seems to be doing just fine. Her classes are going well, she's making friends, and she seems quite happy. (Plus, have I mentioned that the Target near her has an Ulta and a Starbucks inside? She might be spending a little too much time and money in there.)   So even though it wasn't quite the Parents Weekend we thought we were going to get, it was a really good one!  (And now, bonus - we get to go back next month for a football game!)