Looking for a Carolina adrenaline rush? Consider Charlotte and surroundings. There’s more to this cosmopolitan North Carolina city than the airport (a very good one) and formidable financial institutions.
In or near Charlotte you can:
See how the big guys go ferociously fast on Sunday afternoons at the NASCAR Hall of Fame. This is a high-tech venue. It’s packed with realistic video simulations. Fifty-plus hands-on digital kiosks keep the virtual action coming nonstop. Assembled in the Hall are 31 vintage races cars spanning seven decades. Laced through the place is much more than memorabilia. It’s suffused with the memories of the greatest stock car drivers of all time. If you thought the sport was just about putting your accelerator foot through the floor and constantly turning left, a trip here will dispel all of that.
Find out how some of the most beautiful birds on the planet are mended so they might fly again. The Carolina Raptor Center gives you an up-close and personal insight into 25 different species of Mother Nature’s most graceful airborne hunters. An expert staff can answer your questions.
Take on some magnificent Class IV rapids at the U.S. National Whitewater Center. A bit too extreme? Consider a Canopy Tour, rock climbing, or the rope challenge course. More prosaically there are 14 full miles of mountain bike trails. The center sits on 400 acres, adventurously arrayed along the Catawba River, billed as “the largest manmade whitewater river in the world.”
Story by Jerry Chandler
(Images: The U.S. Army, UNWC)
