Mega Update

This past week has been a whirlwind filled with family, work, golf, travel, and the outdoors. Here's a recap:

Saturday June 23
My boss, his wife, and I had dinner at the 42nd Street Oyster Bar with two developers and their families from West Virigina who were on their way to Myrtle Beach for vacation. The restaurant looks like a strip club from the outside but once inside it's a great atmosphere and has a lot of history. The coolest thing was the display of NC license plates from former governors, legislators, and other important folks.

Sunday June 24
My uncle, aunt, and cousins came to NC to visit with our gparents and to look for some land in the mountains. Two cousins from my grandmother's side, that nobody had ever met, also came down from Chesapeake, VA which was interesting. We went to Cracker Barrel and I had pancakes, bacon, and okra (it was brunch!). Dad and Emily also came as well.

Wednesday June 27
My company has an annual conference for the developers, investors, and property manager with which we work. This time we decided to have a golf tournament which I was in charge of organizing (with a lot of help from coworkers). We arrived at the course, Heritage Golf Club in Wake Forest, early in anticipation of the shotgun start at 9:00 AM. The weather was beautiful, a little hot, but a pretty good day for golf. Only one person didn't show up so we had 31 golfers with most of those being non-staffers which made us happy. We gave away some great prizes including a putter for closest-to-the-pin which also came with a Retief Goosen autographed head cover thanks to the company rep that was at the store when we bought it.

Wednesday night we had the conference cocktail reception and then dinner at Winston's with a lot of developers. It was a looonnngg day but a lot of fun.

Thursday June 28Full day of conferencing. Last year I moderated a panel but only had to do an intro for a speaker this time, so not much exciting to mention. Attendance was over 200 so it was a full house.

I left the conference early to pack and hit the road to Charleston, WV to speak on a conference panel on Friday. It was about a 5.5 hour drive but it's a great drive through the mountains.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday June 29-July 1
Attended the WV conference. I was part of a four member panel with three lenders bankers and I was the only syndicator. I think the presentation part went well, but the Q&A was a firing squad. It was tough but a good experience and now I know what to expect for next year (assuming I'm invited to speak again).

After the conference, I hit the road to do some sightseeing; destination: New River Gorge Bridge. The bridge is the western hemisphere's largest steel-arch span bridge and was pretty cool to drive across. My original plans were to camp at one of the area's state parks but I didn't feel like gathering and loading my gear on Thursday before I left so I sought a hotel. Unfortunately, the hotel I found only had smoking rooms left so I headed back south to NC.

I still wanted to do something outdoors so I began pondering options. Should I head west to drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway to see the Lincove Viaduct, Grandfather Mountain, and then Mt. Mitchell? I decided against that in anticipation of the holiday traffic on the parkway and ended up heading down I-77 stopping about an hour north of Statesville at a Hampton Inn. My destination for Saturday was Stone Mountain State Park (very similar to Georgia's big hunk of granite). You may recall a blog post about a previous trip to the park in January 2006 where the winds were wicked and destroyed my tent. I didn't attempt the hike to the summit that weekend and it's been on my list of things to do since.

I arrived at the park around 9:30 and was on the trail by 9:45. I was surprised how deserted the park was at that hour, but realized that most of the folks start emerging closer to lunch time after rolling out of their sleeping bags. The 4.5 mile trail was rated strenuous but that mostly applied to the first 0.75 miles to the top which was straight up the granite for a good part. If you did that climb everyday you'd be in pretty good shape. The summit was awesome as all I could hear was my heart pounding, the wind, and some bugs in the scrubby grass. The pock marked surface looked like a moonscape with the occasional gnarly tree clinging tightly to the granite.

Photos from the Hike



After the hike I invited myself to my sister's apartment in Charlotte to help her get ready to leave for NYC for a month of training for her job at BofA. We went to dinner at La Paz (same La Paz as in Vinings) and had a good time visiting.

Sunday I dropped Emily at the airport around 6:45 and hit the road back to Raleigh and here I am now.