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Emma (left) and photographer Paulina examined an outdoor sculpture.

For this week’s trip, we ventured out the farthest out we have gone all summer, taking the 77X bus into Charlotte for the day. Trying to catch the CATS bus is always a bit of a risk for us, because somehow we are never completely sure we’ve read the schedule right. We rushed to get to the bus stop before 9 am, and then ended up waiting awhile for the bus to arrive. When it finally came, we felt a great sense of relief in being able to sit back and just look out the window for the next 45 minutes or so. Arriving in Charlotte, we mistakenly got off a stop too early, but decided it was better to get off too early than too late since we could simply walk into the city. We eventually came to the city center, where the huge statues of the early settlers stand at the four corners of the intersection. From there, reluctant to actually consult our map, we followed signs and our memories to the Levine Museum.

At the Levine Museum, we paid five dollars to get access to all of the exhibits and could take as many pictures as we wanted. The first exhibit we went to was called Cottonfields to Skyscrapers, and was about Charlotte’s growth from the end of the civil war to today. There was a short film prior to the main exhibit. In the main exhibit, there were boards of information you could read, pictures, mini-movies, and models of houses, factories, and businesses throughout the time periods. The second exhibit was about a court case in South Carolina, which became one of five cases joined in Brown v. Board of Education to end segregation in schools, and how that affected the people involved. After our visit, we were both getting hungry, so we headed around the corner and up the street a bit to Fuel Pizza.

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Reflections in the mirrors inside the skull statue.

After lunch, we set out in the direction of the Bechtler Museum. Although we didn’t go in, we really enjoyed the park across the street. The huge statue of the skull at the entrance is both a beautiful mosaic and a place to sit if you go inside the giant head. The moon on the ceiling and the mirrors all around created a magical effect, reflecting parts of the sculpture and our own faces back at us. Wandering around the rest of the park, we noticed all the signs had towns around the world that shared the first or last name with a famous author, and by combining the two signs on the same post would spell out a name like Mark Twain or Lewis Carroll. Our other favorite statues included a mosaic cat, as well as large towers of books that seemed to be blowing open in the wind with their pages scattered around the park. One part of the park also had a fountain with giant fish that squirted out water as kids gleefully played in it.

When we were finished at the park, we still had time until we had to go catch the bus, so we decided to look for the Settler’s Cemetery, a pre-Civil War cemetery in the middle of downtown. We headed past a fountain on the way, where we spent some time playing near the water. Eventually, however, we found the cemetery which had lots of graves and a sign near the entrance listing the names of those buried there. Some of the graves were marked with a Confederate cross, characterizing them as the graves of former Confederate soldiers. We had just enough time to walk though the cemetery before heading towards the Charlotte Transportation Center. We got picked up from Northcross Park and Ride because the bus didn’t return all the way to Davidson until later in the afternoon.

The Levine Museum of the New South is open Monday-Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. More information about hours and prices can be found on their web page at www.museumofthenewsouth.org/ ^[4].

The bus left Sadler Square (home to Our Town Cinemas and the Healthy Home Market) at around 9 a.m., and was the last inbound morning bus out of Davidson. The outbound bus from Charlotte Transportation Center left at about 1:22 p.m. from Bay X.

Click on any of the photos below to view the gallery