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Items for sale in the Boulevard gallery, NoDa, Charlotte (Scarborough photo)

Greetings from the Charlotte area in North Carolina, where I'm busily researching a combination NASCAR/travel article.  Thanks very much to the Chattanooga is Home blog, which featured my Perceptive Travel Blog post (about Charlotte and the places I'm investigating) in the latest Carnival of Cities. 

Tomorrow I'm on the road to drive up part of the Blue Ridge Parkway in western North Carolina, but I wanted to write a quick post about some fun things for families in and around the city of Charlotte. 

This past Friday I enjoyed one of the twice-monthly art gallery "crawls" in the hip NoDa ("North Davidson Street" arts district of north Charlotte. Older kids who are into the arts would have a fun time here, with lots of interesting creations to admire.  I saw plenty of families strolling around in the balmy evening  --  maybe some preteens or teens even went to see legendary blues/rock guitarist Johnny Winter, who was playing the Neighborhood Theatre, a "non-smoking, all ages live music venue" in NoDa.

Sunday I walked through part of Charlotte's pretty downtown (did you know that it's the #2 banking center in the US behind New York?  I didn't know that, either.)  The very well-executed Levine Museum of the New South does a terrific job of detailing the rise of this area "from cotton fields to skyscrapers" using interactive exhibits and voice and music recordings.  See the inside of a sharecropper shack,  some original cotton mill equipment (this is the home of Cannon towels, among other mills) and a section of an old Belk's Department Store.

Today I visited Pit Crew U, where they train (and train hard, I might add!) the pit crews to do those amazing 14-second pit stops "over the wall" at NASCAR races. 

In the afternoon I checked out a great place for families, the U.S. National Whitewater Center.  It's the largest and only man-made recirculating whitewater venue of its kind in the world; 12 million gallons of water flow through it.  They offer guided rides in everything from two hours of flat river paddling (all ages, on the Catawba River) to rock climbing (age 4+) to guided whitewater rafting (ages 12+) to mountain biking on 11 miles of trails (no age specified, "technically challenging.")   You can rent everything you need right there, or bring your own.  The US Canoe and Kayak teams train here -- pretty cool.  It's an amazing facility.

Tomorrow I'm off to western North Carolina, with more posts to follow....

Technorati tags:  travel, family travel, Charlotte, North Carolina