While we were up in Pittsburgh this past weekend, I decided to check one of my mom’s old haunts for myself–Walnut Street. Located in the Shadyside neighborhood, Walnut Street actually reminds me a lot of King Street in Charleston what with the abundant number of stores and restaurants lining the road.
Every year in the fall, students at Wake look forward to what’s known as Fall Break which is basically a fancy name for the three-day weekend we get off from classes. I usually go home for this break but to switch things up my dad and grandparents came down to Wake Forest for the football game against Syracuse.
Dad flew into Greensboro the night before my grandparents arrived and we got dinner to celebrate the beginning of the weekend. The next afternoon, after my grandparents checked into their hotel, the four of us grabbed a light lunch downtown before making our way over to the Reynolda House. Fun fact of the day, Wake’s campus was funded by the tobacco industry. Yep, the land that now serves as my beloved university once belong to R.J. Reynolds and his wife, Katherine Reynolds, who at one point were considered to be the wealthiest couple in North Carolina. Reynolds was the founder of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which is still based in Winston-Salem.
This past weekend my dad and grandparents came to visit me for the Wake Forest-Syracuse football game. My dad flew into North Carolina the night before my grandparents arrived and so we decided to grab dinner at a local restaurant relatively close to campus, Milner’s. As described by the chef himself as “refined southern cuisine,” Milner’s menu most definitely lives up to its promise. The food is four star, with options ranging from trout to risotto and oysters to hanger steak, with a flair of southern charm that reminds you of a home cooked meal without any of the effort on your part. I’ve only been to Milner’s once about two years ago but the dining experience was just as wonderful as I had remembered.
After I graduated high school in 2011, my family and I traveled around France and Spain for two weeks. For the second half of our European adventure, we stayed in a timeshare in Málaga, Spain that was right off of the beach. The view from the condo was incredible with both views of the ocean to the left and the distant mountains to our right.
A few weeks ago, while my friends Alice and Grace were visiting for the weekend, we spent most of that Saturday outside exploring Hanging Rock State Park. The park isn’t that far away from Wake, maybe about an hour or so, and after their 9+ hour car ride the day before, we all agreed that some physical activity was desperately needed.
Before heading out to Hanging Rock, we stopped for breakfast at one of my favorite bagel shops in Winston, Bagel Station. I’m pretty sure that their breakfast bagels have some kind of magical restorative powers and the prices are cheaper compared to other breakfast places in town. We fueled up on carbs while making a game plan for the day: we allotted about 4 hours for our trip to give us time to stop by Walmart to pick up camo for the celebrations later that night.
The program I studied abroad with last fall included two 10 day breaks during the semester and for the first of these breaks my mom flew all the way over from the States to travel with me to Berlin and Brussels. While the history of Berlin is fascinating and the city is a weird combination of old and incredibly modern, it was really the quaint little city of Brussels that really captured my heart on that trip. We were only in the city for about 2.5 days total and we made the most of our stay by exploring the streets of Brussels, sharing whipped cream covered waffles and talking to the locals.
