Charlotte: It's Not Awful

With our house bartering at a temporary hold, we decided to escape Raleigh for the weekend and head to what I consider our rival city: Charlotte. Besides being home to the hated Carolina Panthers, Charlotte has recently stolen two of my best friends - Ben and Veganick - dudes who I have been friends with and played music with for close to 13 years. A few weeks ago, Ben proposed to his now fiancee Emily, so a congratulatory visit was needed. And we love road trips.

The Future Mr. and Mrs. Ben Mullet

Friday

We left early afternoon Friday and of course we hit multiple traffic jams. This gave us a good chance to find some more license plates for our default road trip game.

Apparently Charlotte has a light rail, and Ben and Emily's apartment is RIGHT on it. I'm a bit jealous of this, but we used it a lot. We went out to what proved to be an expensive dinner at a Mexican place (I think it was called Vida Cantina), where Ben asked me to be a groomsman. I agreed and we celebrated with tacos. We decided to go spend more money. "Going out" is an expensive habit.  We met up with our friend Raquel, who's in Charlotte for the summer house sitting Tolga's family's house and their dog. We've now hung out with her 3 times in 3 different states*. Small world.
*The 3 best non-Hawaii states (in alphabetical order): California, North Carolina, Texas.

Saturday

Saturday's agenda: Modern Fabrics, West Elm, find cupcakes, find a record store. The Hambones told us about Modern Fabrics, and Sarah wanted to find something to recover a couple pillows.  (She will likely blog about this later and I'm sure you'll all find it way more entertaining than what I blog about but deal with it.) Turns out Ben and Emily live rather close.

So we walk a block and Sarah found a nice fabric while I looked in the skate shop that was next door. Later we went to West Elm - I'd never been to one and honestly wasn't too impressed. On to cupcakes...

Smallcakes is apparently a chain, and the dude was on Cupcake Wars, though Sarah didn't remember him. The cupcakes - pretty good. I got a PB&J, which tasted just like a PB&J sandwich. Sarah got the Margarita, which she said had the best icing she's ever had. I concurred. After this we went to Lunchbox Records, where I could've dropped a lot of money but talked myself out of the one record I was considering buying (I already have the Career Suicide track from it anyway). I'm gonna need this at some point though.

While we waited for our pals to get off work, we decided to look up something cheaper to do that night. And according to the interweb, the #1 thing to do in Charlotte wasn't even in Charlotte. #2? Bowling. And it seemed to be true since we had a 2 hour wait for a lane. About an hour in, the extremely loud DJ switched from rock to dance music. Sarah got down. You can tell by the pictures that she was alone.  It didn't deter her in the slightest.

About this time, you're probably thinking, "Nick, your posts are way too long." And you know what? You're probably right, but this is also (half) my blog and you came here to read it. You might as well keep going. What else do you have to do right now? Just finish it. So anyway, somehow I won the first game. We didn't finish the second before our time ran out, but Veganick was in the lead. This doesn't really matter, but it does to him. Arriving back at Bemily's building, we find the elevator is out. So we head to the stairs along with these 2 drunk girls who had also arrived at the elevator. One of them was REALLY drunk. Being the gentleman that I am, I help her up the stairs. Also, Sarah told me I should. The girl proceeded to tell me, "I like the way you breathe. It's sexy." Which is easily the weirdest complement I've ever received. I told her that I'd let my wife know.

Sunday

Before we left, we decided we needed to take a picture of the most prominent building visible from their parking deck. Yeah it's really a big pink building. I don't know how that got approved by anyone.

No trip to Charlotte is complete without a visit to our closest Ikea. We were mostly just browsing, coming up with ideas for if we close on the the house. We did get some plates and bowls, and Sarah got these mirrors because she's on a hexagon/honeycomb kick. I carried them in the big yellow bag. I also decided to match the pink building and am not ashamed of it.

After leaving Ikea without even eating any Swedish meatballs (plus they have Pepsi products), we had to stop off at Ben's place of business to give him the keys and parking pass we had to borrow. I've already given out lots of free advertising in this post, so let's just say that Ben is the sales manager at a large center that sells guitars and stuff. (Hint: it's Guitar Center.)

Those are some pretty sweet guitars.  (Note: Sarah thought this was how you would naturally hold a guitar.) You can't really tell in this picture, but that guitar is the same color as the socks that Oregon wore in the BCS championship game 2 years ago. I own a pair of those socks because I thought they were hilarious/awesome (thanks Mandi!). Nike calls the color "volt" and are using it a lot now. Soon this will be a Nike blog.

All in all, Charlotte isn't the worst place we've ever been.  But stay tuned for a WAY bigger vacation coming up in less than 2 weeks.  Where are we going?  I'll give you a hint: it rhymes with Dan Mancisco.