Another hidden gem in North Carolina that we had never been to before is the NC Museum of Transportation. It's about 90 minutes from Durham, in a village called Spencer, and we visited it on Memorial Day, when the temperatures climbed well above 90 degrees.

The museum has a large collection of old trains, some of them from the 1800's, and beautiful old cars. It was cool to see those trains in real life -- I'd only seen them in movies and comics books before.