After wrapping up our visit to Georgia, we pulled out last Sunday. We overnighted in Charlotte; we tried to park in the Bass Pro Shops parking lot but since this one is part of a mall, we were asked to leave by an external security company (they were super nice about it!). We went down the road to Walmart, which was fine, but then V didn’t get a chance to spend his B-day BPS gift card. 
Monday, we pulled in to a park just south-west of Winston-Salem, NC. The drive up had been cold and rainy (we had to stop in Charlotte because we had the wipers on high, and still struggled to see the lines on the wet road with the glare from the headlights). And it was that way for a bit. Give me a blizzard any day…way easier than this awful ice! LOL!
Tuesday we woke up to everything being covered in a layer of ice…
We stayed off the icy roads, and Vaughn and the bigs stayed home and rested and relaxed. It was a much needed family day 
Since then, dad and the bigs have been busy every day doing ice storm cleanup in nearby High Point. Lots of chainsaw work and hauling off limbs.
The littles and I have had it a little easier 😉
Last week we drove over to Greensboro for the day. It’s about 45 minutes away (once you figure out the ill-signed detour due to road work on the way).
Our first stop was the…
where we got the scoop on the best family-friendly stops in Greensboro! The staff was very friendly and knowledgeable, and she had lots of brochures for both city and area destinations; there were a ton of things to choose from! (Be sure to pick up the little Greensboro Visitor’s Guide magazine – it has some great coupons in the back!)
We decided our first stop would be the FREE Greensboro Historical Museum…
We were surprised by how nice it is!!! The museum is paid for out of the city street taxes (at least I’m pretty sure that’s what he said); no reciprocal membership needed.
There are two floors of exhibits. On the lower (which is really the second floor), there is a section of pottery…
Then there were some beautiful rooms that were reproductions out of a local mansion…
And a fun gift shop (but unfortunately they were a little classy for bumper stickers. bummer. LOL!)…
Then we got to the chronologically ordered history of the state. We loved this well-done, concise area. The exhibits were brief enough that we wanted to check out all the info, displayed appealingly, and had lots of visuals that kept the littles interested.
This case is about the Guildford Courthouse, which is now a National Battlefield (and we’ll be visiting there this week!)…
The kids thought this board was a hoot! ‘It’s your choice’ has 5 different questions, each with 3 different options for answers. You slide the question block to be underneath the answer that most represents how you would react to the question. When you are all done answering the questions, you let go of the board, and it tips one way or the other, or stays level. There is a small window to the right of the board – slide up the little lever, and it displays what side you would have been on in the Revolution. The options are British Loyalist, Quaker, or American Patriot.
Of course we got American Patriot. 😀
Fun and varied displays showed us the history of Greensboro…
There were some bigger than life portraits, with narration…
This area, like Augusta, our previous stop, has a history in textiles. In fact, Wrangler grew out of one of the companies here (Blue Bell – and I thought BB was only an ice cream company in TX!), and there is a Wrangler factory right across the road from the museum!
The history of media in the area (don’t believe everything they feed you, folks 😉 )…
We really enjoyed the historical walkthru, but upstairs we found an even better section of the museum (IMHO)…
The John M and Isabelle F Murphy Collection of Confederate Firearms!
This is believed to be the largest collection of Confederate longarms in the world!
Mr. Murphy retired from the Navy; during his service, he was active duty in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters in WWII.
He and his wife amassed this large collection of CW era southern rifles, and collected the historical data on each one. It’s a very interesting display!
Sprinkled throughout this section of the museum are incredibly detailed paintings that depict CW sights.
This painting is titled, “Band of Brothers” by Don Troiani…
There was another area on the top floor called Welcome to the Gate City. It depicts Greensboro businesses in the early 1900s. Greensboro is called the Gateway City because it was a railroad hub, and thus was the Gateway to the rest of the nation.
The kids really liked the mock switchboard. It took a bit of explaining on my part to give them the history of the telephone, and explain how phone calls would have been made in the early 1900’s! They were pretty lost. LOL! but before too long, they were busy putting calls through, and evesdropping on the lines!
…Ok, not really evesdropping 😉 each connecting ‘number’ had a recording of a person telling about their life at that time…
the entrance to the area is made to look like the check-in area, or lobby, of the old Hotel Clegg…
and through the double doors on the other side of the lobby, is the town of Greensboro…
each shop front opens into a mock schoolhouse…
theater…
or drug store…
there were others too, like the firehouse. In the theater there was a movie playing – it shared the history of Greensboro, and explained that the city is named after Revolutionary war hero Major General Nathanael Green who was the commander of the American forces during the Battle of Guildford Courthouse.
We really enjoyed our visit to the Greensboro Historical Museum.
After we toured the inside, we walked through their grounds outside.
The buildings were not open, but it was a lovely day to be wandering among trees filled with buds that were just beginning to bloom,
and some beautiful flowering bulbs. It was especially delightful as it was the first day of spring, and the rest of the country (at least back home) were all posting pics of more snow and lamenting their freezing temps! LOL! 😀 
The Greensboro Historical Museum is an exceptional museum for being free! It is clean, well laid out, and meticulously maintained. It is open Tue – Sun, and you can visit the GHM’s website to check out times, get directions, and find more info on the museum. There is a small parking lot behind the building, and a parking lot across the street, both exclusively for museum visitors (I didn’t see any big rig friendly parking as this is the downtown area of Greensboro). I would suggest 1 to 2 hours to cover the museum, but set aside more if you like to read every plaque, or your kids will want to play in the ‘Welcome to Gate City’ for extended amounts of time like mine did! (we are leisurely tourists!) 😉
You can find out more about the GHM at the Greensboro Historical Museum website here.
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