North Carolina is a beautiful state. Visitors usually remark on the number of trees. So did I when I moved here in 1970, but it has always amazed me at how monotonous the trees and the beauty can be. You can see hours upon hours of trees as you drive along any typical highway across the state. And often--except for the number of lanes and cars--the urban highways are indistinguishable from the rural highways! For example:

Here is a Typical Rural Highway

Actually this is US-1, about 40 miles south of Raleigh, on the way to Southern Pines.

This is in the Suburbs

This is US-1 in the vicinity of Apex, North Carolina, which about 10 miles south of Raleigh. Apex and Raleigh are both parts of the Raleigh-Durham metropolitan area, which has a population of just over 1 million.

And this is in the City

This is US-1 (again), but here it's a part of The Raleigh Beltline, which is also known as Interstate-440 and is the highway that circles the city. This scene is approaching its US-70 interchange, the site of Crabtree Valley Mall, the largest mall between Atlanta and Washington and one of the busiest interchanges on the beltline.

Have you noticed how similar each picture is? These pictures were taken on a Sunday afternoon (actually during our Weymouth Woods day trip).

By the way, I was 13 when we moved to North Carolina from Arizona. What a contrast that was. Growing up in southern Arizona, I knew how much life existed in the Sonora Desert: palo verde trees, saguaro, barrel, and cholla cactus, ocotilla, wrens, road runners, gila monsters, lizards and horned toads, peccaris (wild pigs) and so on, but I was overwhelmed by the thick vegetation, the heavy humidity, and the teeming population of noisy night creatures of North Carolina.

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Homepage / September 30, 1998