April 2021
Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., and at 308 square miles has a burgeoning arts community and a booming food scene. Charlotte also serves as a great hub for one-day, one-tank trips out of town for active, enriching experiences.
Keeping in mind that things are still opening up, pandemic-wise, let’s take a look at some of my favorites.
In the city
Start in North Davidson, aka NoDa, Charlotte’s arts and entertainment district. The old-fashioned McGill Rose Garden, which contains a thousand rosebushes in nearly 230 varieties, is home to Rosie’s Coffee & Wine Garden. Go on a weekday at 7 a.m., when it opens, and you can have a quiet coffee and the roses all to yourself.
Looking for a different kind of experience with your java? Try the Mac Tabby Cat Cafe. As its name implies, it’s a cat coffee lounge, complete with 12 roaming felines.
The nearby Common Market in Plaza Midwood is a combination convenience store, dive bar and neighborhood deli. Works by local artists hang on the walls, and you’ll see more as you make your way around the city—a lot of the art is in the form of street murals, showcased throughout the city on buildings and on the street surfaces themselves.
There’s also the Mint Museum, which prides itself on interactive exhibitions that bring augmented reality into the museum experience, and the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, one of the best collections of 20th-century artists.
For lunch, stop at The Cowfish Sushi Burger Bar (one of three locations in the U.S.), located in the South Park district, where they craft one-of-a-kind fresh sushi and burger dishes like nowhere else on the planet. There’s even something on the menu called “burgushi.”
Charlotte is home to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, and about 20 minutes from there is the Charlotte Motor Speedway, where you can pay to drive or be driven around the track in a genuine race car.
For me, the best hands-on experience is Charlotte’s U.S. National Whitewater Center. Inside, you can go whitewater rafting, zip lining, rock climbing and more. The hidden gem is the 1,300 acres of woodlands surrounding the park, with more than 50 miles of trails for hiking or mountain biking. If you prefer whitewater rafting, offerings range from a mellow family rafting experience with Class II rapids all the way up to high-intensity Class IV rafting.
Outside the city
If you drive about 45 minutes southwest of Charlotte you’ll reach Kings Mountain National Military Park, just across the state line in Blacksburg, South Carolina. This is the site of a victory that was considered the turning point of the Revolutionary War in the South. To get both sides’ perspectives of the battlefield, walk along the 1.5-mile, self-guiding Battlefield Trail.
For a quiet finish to your day, drive about 30 minutes north of Charlotte and you’ll arrive at Lake Norman, the largest man-made body of fresh water in the state. There, you can fish for bass and yellow perch, or rent a pontoon boat for a lazy afternoon. Stand-up paddleboarding is also available.
Raptor rapture
The Carolina Raptor Center, a 20-minute drive from Charlotte, is well worth the trip.
This nonprofit education and rescue center, featuring corvids, eagles, falcons, hawks, owls, vultures and other birds, is located on 57 acres inside Latta Nature Preserve in Huntersville.
Between 800 and 1,000 injured or orphaned raptors are brought to the center each year, the most for any raptor medical center in the U.S.
This is an interactive experience, and for a small donation you can take part in releasing a rehabilitated raptor into the wild.—PG
