Growing up in the far western reaches of a state carved long ago from Virginia, just before the rambling hills of the East are replaced by vast stretches of flatlands covered in corn, I somehow developed an acute fascination with a college town in the Piedmont of North Carolina.
Maybe it was the stately name whose mere utterance evoked the placid, puritan scene expounded thoughtfully within Hawthorne’s “Sunday at Home” while also seemingly screaming “higher learning.”
Maybe it was an early introduction to the legend of Peter Dromgoole and the wicked mystery his story evokes, cast in even greater shadow later by the construction of Gimghoul Castle which serves as the emblematic icon of UNC’s Skull and Bones-esque secret society, the Order of Gimghoul.
Or maybe I just really wanted to continue the hurt placed upon Rasheed Wallace during the 1995 Elite Eight by my all-time favorite University of Kentucky basketball player, Andre Riddick.
For a multitude of reasons, I have always been thoroughly intrigued by Chapel Hill, though I would seldom mention it around certain UK sports faithful for fear of severe beatings. Thankfully, when I got involved with a short freckled girl from Raleigh whose father and sister claim UNC as their alma mater, my desire to visit the town was finally fulfilled.
Saturday was clear, cool fall day, and we took advantage of its perfection to carouse UNC’s campus and take in a Tar Heel beat down of cross-state rivals East Carolina (sorry, Sally). I spent much of the day pondering upon my looming school decision and trying to place myself amidst the Bell Tower and the Old Well, to see if I fit. And I did.
Dinner at the Carolina Club didn’t hurt matters either.
Roaming the Holy City 