{"id":290,"date":"2015-10-03T17:09:28","date_gmt":"2015-10-03T17:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/?p=290"},"modified":"2022-12-30T03:07:30","modified_gmt":"2022-12-30T03:07:30","slug":"chapel-hill-and-snack-cakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/chapel-hill-and-snack-cakes\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapel Hill and Snack Cakes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/littledebbie.jpg\" alt=\"Little Debbie\" width=\"450\" height=\"213\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-291\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/littledebbie.jpg 450w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/littledebbie-300x142.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 450px) 100vw, 450px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Earlier this year I visited North Carolina to meet a famous cicada expert (Bill Reynolds of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, NC). While I was in the Raleigh area, I decided that it would be a good idea to visit Chapel Hill, NC. I had not been to Chapel Hill since the 1990s, and at the time I had a blast, so I felt it was worth a second visit.<\/p>\n<p>Chapel Hill has spawned many interesting musical acts, but perhaps their most iconic is Southern Culture on the Skids (SCOTS). SCOTS is a perfect mix of elements of rock, psychobilly, country, and novelty music &#8212; it&#8217;s like they took parts of each, and made something better than the sum of the parts. One of my favorite SCOTS songs is <em>Camel Walk<\/em>, which features the lyrics:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nOWWWW WEEE, Little Debbie, Little Debbie<br \/>\nI&#8217;m a-comin&#8217; on home, baby, &#8217;cause you make me wanna walk\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/i01NMa5yIwA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The problem is the Little Debbie, Little Debbie part. A problem you say? Yes, because I became momentarily obsessed with Little Debbie snack cakes. The problem with that is when I eat too many Little Debbie snack cakes, it saps my energy. Realistically speaking, you should only eat one dessert a day &#8212; and not buy two or three boxes of snack cakes and some Pabst tall-boys, and then spend the majority of your vacation watching YouTubes and napping in a hotel room (a little hyperbole, but close enough to the truth). <\/p>\n<p>So, to recap, you can see how my unrestrained mind works: 1) Visit North Carolina, 2) think about visiting Chapel Hill, 3) think about Chapel Hill&#8217;s best band SCOTS, 4) think about their song Camel Walk, and its lyrics about Little Debbie snack cakes, 5) go to Walmart to buy a USB cable but leave with Pabst and boxes of snack cakes, and 6) hang out at the hotel &#8212; instead of Raleigh or Chapel Hill &#8212; because I ate too many snacks. <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19446784404_eb629e6d60_c.jpg\" alt=\"My North Carolina Breakfast of Champions\" width=\"600\" height=\"800\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2351\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19446784404_eb629e6d60_c.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19446784404_eb629e6d60_c-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19446784404_eb629e6d60_c-230x307.jpg 230w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Learn from my mistakes: no matter how delicious banana cakes are, limit yourself to one a day. You will appreciate them more, and you will get more out of life. <\/p>\n<p>That was a massive tangent. Back to Chapel Hill. <\/p>\n<p>Chapel Hill is the perfect college town. They have all the right ingredients.<br \/>\n\u221a Music venues.<br \/>\n\u221a Music stores.<br \/>\n\u221a Brewpub(s).<br \/>\n\u221a Museum(s)<br \/>\n\u221a A variety of non-chain restaurants.<br \/>\n\u221a (I will assume) bookstores.<br \/>\n\u221a a College (UNC).<br \/>\n\u221a better weather than most states north of North Carolina.<br \/>\n\u221a an interesting local culture featuring unique art, music, and food.<br \/>\n\u221a College students.<\/p>\n<p>Visiting Chapel Hill for the second time was like visiting a movie set after watching a really awesome movie about it. So what do I mean by that? Well, the last time I visited I was with friends, we partied, drank, played cards, and went to amazing local restaurants, bars, and music events &#8212; heck, my friends and I even danced on stage at a SCOTS show! SCOTS drummer David Hartman (dating a friend at the time) took me to a favorite BBQ joint. You couldn&#8217;t ask for a better Chapel Hill experience. <\/p>\n<p>Visting in 2015, all the right elements were there: the Local 506 bar, CD Alley, the brewpubs, the restaurants with their painted goats, colorful band flyers, and stickers festooning every vertical surface. I&#8217;ll say it again: it was like visiting a movie set of a movie I&#8217;ve already seen. (Now I&#8217;m thinking of the NLP technique where you step outside memory and view it objectively, but let&#8217;s not go down another tangent.) Sobriety, daylight, time limitations, and a lack of companions made my visit decidedly different &#8212; but I still had fun. <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/chapelhill.jpg\" alt=\"Goats and Music in Chapel Hill\" width=\"640\" height=\"376\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-295\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/chapelhill.jpg 640w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/chapelhill-300x176.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>What I enjoyed about Chapel Hill this time around:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>CD Alley (405-C W Franklin St): a great little record store, with a good selection. Appropriately, I bought a CD of SCOTS&#8217; Zombified album (which is great Halloween rock n&#8217; roll music). CD Alley feels like an authentic record store: cramped, dark, decorated outside with stickers and fliers of local bands &#8212; for a music obsessive, it feels like home.<\/li>\n<li>Carolina Brewery (450 W Franklin St): good brewpub. I had the Firecracker lager (I think), which was tasty.<\/li>\n<li>Local 506 (506 W Franklin St): they were closed, but it was great just to stand outside the door and take in all the interesting, multi-colored band flyers<\/li>\n<li>All the interesting stickers and band flyers all over town. Some people don&#8217;t like graffiti, especially when it is done to their property without their consent, but in a college town, it just makes sense. Light poles and mailboxes would look naked without it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19850840840_6b949fe47c_c-1.jpg\" alt=\" Stickers and Band Flyers of Chapel Hill North Carolina\" width=\"800\" height=\"711\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2352\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19850840840_6b949fe47c_c-1.jpg 800w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19850840840_6b949fe47c_c-1-300x267.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19850840840_6b949fe47c_c-1-768x683.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19850840840_6b949fe47c_c-1-230x204.jpg 230w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Even though my second Chapel Hill visit was not as &#8220;epic&#8221; as my first, there was one thing that made it special &#8212; one thing that I would not have experienced the last time around, and that is the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ackland.org\">Ackland Museum<\/a> (101 S Columbia St,). Ackland was around the last time I was in town, but leisurely enjoying a well-curated museum was not on my agenda in the 1990s. <\/p>\n<p>Ackland is a wonderful medium-sized museum with a well-balanced diversity of art spanning many centuries and styles, from the ancient&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19617053238_d35c1d7c26_z.jpg\" alt=\" Lion art has &#x27;t changed much in the past 4000 or so years.\" width=\"640\" height=\"640\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2353\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19617053238_d35c1d7c26_z.jpg 640w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19617053238_d35c1d7c26_z-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19617053238_d35c1d7c26_z-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19617053238_d35c1d7c26_z-230x230.jpg 230w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&#8230; to ultra-modern&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19886350610_e371d48b74_c.jpg\" alt=\" Glitter Deer in the Ackland Museum in Chapel Hill NC\" width=\"450\" height=\"800\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2354\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19886350610_e371d48b74_c.jpg 450w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19886350610_e371d48b74_c-169x300.jpg 169w, https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/19886350610_e371d48b74_c-230x409.jpg 230w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 450px) 100vw, 450px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>So what did we learn:<\/p>\n<p>1) Go easy on the snack cakes, but do enjoy them from time to time.<\/p>\n<p>2) If you return to a place you&#8217;ve been in the past, don&#8217;t expect it to be the same, but do enjoy it for all that it is. <\/p>\n<p>3) Sometimes you get more out of life when you take it fast, but it is also enjoyable when you take it slow. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this year I visited North Carolina to meet a famous cicada expert (Bill Reynolds of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, NC). While I was in the Raleigh area, I decided that it would be a good idea &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,28,27],"tags":[54,51],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-food-beverages","category-museums","category-roadtrips","tag-54","tag-north-carolina"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dancentury.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}