Bryce's birthday getaway

For Bryce's birthday (April 25th), I planned a surprise weekend trip for us. We left on Friday around lunch time. When I picked him up, I blindfolded him and handed him clues. I gave him a ziploc bag of sand, sunglasses, and the atlas. It took him a total of 30 seconds to figure out where we were going. Next time I will have to make it more tricky. It was about a 5 hour trip from Blacksburg.

While on our drive, we made a quick stop at North Carolina's oldest winery, Duplin Winery. As soon as got off the exit, we saw some vineyards, and immediately pulled off to take some pictures. A guy on a tractor started eyeing us, and so I started snapping pics quicker. As soon as I was ready to hop in the car and be kicked off of what seemed like a driveway, he got off the tractor and started chatting with Bryce. He is one of the brothers that owns Duplin Winery! He was really nice, and told us about this land that he owns right off of the exit. He is starting a project, like a local Farmer's Market, with produce and specialty foods locally grown, that will be sold at this location. He invited us to walk around the landscape. It was really beautiful with a pond, some small vineyards, trees, and an area for some type of structure where they will sell the goods. We took some more photos and headed to the winery down the road.

It was a cute little set up, with a nice restaurant and a big store full of jellies, jams, dressings, wines, souvenirs, and other gourmet foods prepared by the in house chef. We sat down for a free wine tasting and found out that Muscadine wine is not our favorite. It is quite sweet. Our favorite wine we tasted was the most bitter white wine they offered! (It was like a typical Reisling.)

When we arrived in Wilmington, we stopped at Outback for dinner and then headed to our hotel. In the morning, we got up early, ate breakfast, and got on our bikes to head to the Wrightsville Beach. It wasn't as bike friendly as we expected, but we got there safe. The day was fairly cloudy, but still nice and not too hot. Guess who we found on the beach?

Yep, Aaron and Christin drove to Wrightsville from NC State for the day.

We went to the famous Trolley Stop for lunch and filled up on very colorful hot dogs. The Carolina was really good...chili, mustard and cole slaw. Bryce got the Surfer one and it was interesting...nacho cheese and baco-bits.

That night, we walked around downtown Wilmington and along the River walk. There are a lot of beautiful old buildings and Southern plantation-like homes. Per our recommendation from Katherine, we went to The Pilot House for dinner. It was right on the river and had great seafood. I tried fried green tomatoes for the first time!

On Sunday, before we left, we headed to Battleship North Carolina and took a tour. It turned into a 3 hour tour. Bryce loved reading about the history, huge guns and all the ins and outs of the ship. It was a huge ship and it was neat learning about how it worked and its time in WWII.