Pilgrimage to an estranged home
mile 5116
I lived for a year in Raleigh after graduating from college. I mainly consider that a wasted year because Raleigh really isn't like the "cool" towns that I had seen in North Carolina (Asheville and Chapel Hill), it's just a college town like Knoxville, so it was basically a move from a small-ish southern city that I didn't really care to live in where I had lots of friends to a small-ish southern city that I didn't really care to live in where I had zero friends. Maybe I'd have felt better about living there if it had somehow boosted my career or something, but... no, not so much.
Still, I've occasionally felt a mild urge to revisit the place and wondered if there would ever be a convenient time to do so, and it so happens that Raleigh falls almost exactly between Savannah and DC, so here I am. I didn't have any success hunting down the handful of people that I knew there, but I was able to take a tour of some of the places that I remember, most importantly the state art museum, which was always my favorite part of Raleigh. Below are photos of the house I lived in (which is a different color now, but you can sort of see the the way it used to look here), "The Acorn" from Acorn Park, and sculptures from the museum, which include two panorama shots of the giant "Picture This" installation sculpture that I discovered a decade ago while exploring the museum grounds after hours. Kind of hard to make out from ground level, which is part of what makes it so cool (but here is an easier vantage point).
