I invited my friend Chele from The Bona Fide to guest post today. She lives in a beautiful place in North Carolina that I would love to visit someday. I asked her to share a travel article from her area. Make sure you stop by her blog and say hello!

First I want to say with 4 children ages 4, 7, 12 and 14, it is very hard to have the patience to go places like this with them. My fear of things going wrong when we visit places like this usually keeps us from not trying it. We don’t do it often enough. However it is so costly for a family of six to do things like this but this past trip was a huge success and we will be making more time to do these kinds of things with our children!

We live on the coast of Southeastern North Carolina. There are many things to do around here. However we did take a 2 hour and 15 minute trip with some folks from church to New Bern, North Carolina. We went to see the historical place called   Tryon Palace. In colonial times it was the capital of North Carolina for awhile. I’m not going to go into all of the history here but it was a beautiful town with lots of history!

On the ride up our 4 year old did take a nap which I think really helped us!! He was shockingly good all day long!

We took a look through the Palace itself… that actually took all morning. All 4 of my children were into it! All of the cool things they had back then! It sure was a history lesson for all of us! We were able to walk through the original horse stables and we got to see the separate kitchen building and how they made wool spools! It was pretty neat! My seven year old daughter said this was her favorite place because it made her feel like a princess! Ha-Ha!

Next, we went to the park by the water to eat our picnic. We brought sandwiches, chips, drinks and some cookies. They enjoyed that because this weekend actually was during a car show! So we watched the cool cars as we ate!

At this time, we saw this poor blue jay. It must have fallen from the tree it wasn’t even able to fly yet. My hubby put it in a safe place because pigeons were trying to peck at the poor thing. This was my 4 year old son’s highlight of the day. He is still talking about it days later and asking us if we think he is okay!

We went back to the palace area and went to a 30 minute show about John Lawson and his trunk of dead animal skins. I can’t say that was my highlight but my kids enjoyed being able to see a fox, skunk and so on up close!

Next, we went to the Hay house. This was the coolest thing! They were dressed in period clothes, the house was the original house from the 1800’s and we all sat in their living room just as we would today and chatted. The wife and daughter of this Hay house actually talked the way they talked back then! For example, my 4 year old son said to the lady of the house “I like dinosaurs!” And she looked at me and back at him and asked “dinosaurs?” Ha-ha! They even showed some kids games from back then and shared with my children how they were played! Everyone had a blast here!

We did much more but I could write a series. If you live in this area or ever visit, be sure to check out the Tryon Palace. Our whole family enjoyed this day trip together. We need to do things like this more often! We all should be doing this with our children, not only is it bonding time but it also is education for our children! They won’t ever forget this trip they took with their parents!

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