New Bern, NC

This past Thursday-Sunday, the Alvarez family (Ben's parents, siblings, and us) traveled to New Bern, NC, which is where Ben's grandparents used to live.  We stayed in a sweet bed & breakfast which I had never stayed in before.  It was so nice and filled with antiques.  The owners, Ed and Sooki, were super sweet and Sooki made great breakfast every morning!  New Bern is a lot like downtown Easton, if you've ever been there.  Lots of places to walk to and many historic buildings.  We even toured the Tryon Palace where the Governor used to live way back when!  While in New Bern, we did many things that the Alvarez's used to do when they came to visit.  This included dinner at Golden Corral, shopping at their HUGE Walmart, and walking around town.  This is New Bern's 300th anniversary and this weekend was the opening of the new historic center.  We even went to see fireworks that were supposedly black powder aerial fireworks like they had years ago...strangely the looked and sounded a lot like modern day fireworks!!  All in all we had a great time and got to spend a lot of time hanging out as a family.  Ben and I introduced them to the fun game of bananagrams and we played for hours! 

 This is Tryon palace...I wouldn't mind living here!

The other neat thing about New Bern is that it is the birthplace of Pepsi!!!  If you know me, you know how much I love Pepsi so I was very excited about this.  I even bought a charm and a shirt!  We went into the store that used to be a pharmacy which is where Pepsi was first invented!  So cool!  And I learned that Caleb Bradham, the inventor, got his pharmaceutical degree from UMD!! Go Terps!!