City/Country Ride (November 11, 2012)

 Go figure, November 11, and its around 70 degrees. As you can see, a beautiful day to take a ride on the Vulcan. I rode via a country route, went to Charlotte via NC 24/27 but took a very small detour to Wilgrove Airport which is a small private airport just off that main road. Nothing much was flying at the time, but they were moving some planes and fueling another up, so sure they enjoyed the day too. As you can see, its pretty dry in the area, has not been any rain for some three weeks, and they are quite a few inches below normal at this time of year. That may change in the next couple of days.  

Rode to Charlotte, down to Central Avenue. I like that part of town, lots of interesting apartments (such as the building behind the restaurant) and of course some fine restaurants as well. This was a great day to eat outside, and a number of people were taking full advantage. Central has a lot of interesting stores, and a lot of foreign owned stores (many of which seem to be Vietnamese) so a good place to get a lot of variety. It is just outside of town, in fact a good view of Charlotte from this street can be seen on my Richmond and Me Page (which is also a lot of Charlotte and area, as this work thing I am doing involves two places, as does this blog).   

Heading back, went from Charlotte to Concord via NC 49, but made a stop at NoDa (or North Davidson) which is a suburb of Charlotte (which you can sort of see, at least some of the tall buildings wayyyy off in the background at the end of the street). Nice place, again a lot of neat stores, bars, music venues...it is a real artists town or at least it was started that way, as the neighborhood went into decline due to the closing of the mills in the area. Now a lot of people are moving there due to a lot of new apartments building in that area. It is a fun place to explore though, and a lot of interesting businesses can be found there.
Ride ended up being around 40 miles or so- did not pay a lot of attention to distance on this one. It was just a great day to be out, though we can ride most of the year in the Carolinas, you don't get a lot of rides quite this nice in November and it was pretty remarkable. I had a great time, and fun to see these sights on a Sunday in NC. The ride was a fine addition to a really great weekend. Before heading home visited a former co-worker and then rolled back after a two hour and thirty minute ride!