oh carolina | USa
M
y wife’s from New Jersey, and I’m from the Deep South – of Zimbabwe. For years, neither of us wanted to live anywhere other than a city – first London, now New York. But with our one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn no longer able to accommodate my increasing girth and growing family, we decided to look elsewhere for a new home. Grace fancied the New Jersey suburbs where she grew up; I wanted something more rural. In the end, the promise of easy living and a deep porch persuaded us to look below the Mason-Dixon Line. But this had its problems, too. I was keen on going far south – Georgia or Louisiana or Mississippi. My wife rolled her Yankee eyes at the thought of banjos and grits, and suggested somewhere in-between. So last summer we came up with a compromise and paid an extended visit to North Carolina. I had been fascinated with North Carolina since moving to the United States six years ago. To me, there was something intriguing about a state that could produce two senators of such divergent political views (and ethics) as John Edwards and Jesse Helms. But, mostly, I was fascinated because North Carolinian towns I had never heard of – Chapel Hill, Wilmington, Asheville – kept popping up on America’s ‘Best Towns Live In’ lists, and a booming area was being called the Research Triangle and referred to as the Silicon Valley of the south. I asked Grace what was so good about these places but she had barely heard of them either. So we took a flight to Raleigh, the main city in the Research Triangle, to find out what the fuss was about.
‘The first thing I noticed was the smell: mint-fresh forests of towering pine rolled to the Appalachian horizon...’
September 2011 Kanoo World Traveller 33