By Guest Blogger Tracy Huneycutt
My family lives about 45 minutes from Guilford County, and recently my 8-year-old son and I enjoyed a fun, full weekday visiting Colfax and Greensboro!
We started our day with a big breakfast at the Moose Café, located off of I-40 and 421 in Colfax. The café is one of the buildings located inside of the Robert G. Shaw Piedmont Triad Farmers Market. The Moose Café has tons of Southern charm! The restaurant uses fresh ingredients from the farmers market for its recipes. For breakfast, this ranges from huge, fresh biscuits served with apple butter or gravy, a variety of meats like bacon, sausage, and country ham, eggs and omelets, massive pancakes, and scrumptious French toast.
We worked off our meal by walking through the huge Piedmont Triad Farmers Market. My advice would be to come armed with a personal shopping bag, shopping cart, or cooler. Since, it’s impossible to walk through this farmers market without finding tons of unique items or yummy foods to take home! Fresh-cut flowers, plants, regional cheeses, in-season fruits and vegetables, homemade breads and pastries, meats and eggs – this farmer’s market has it all. Some vendors even sell ice cream, sweets, and candies, and there are often food trucks on-site that sell items such as kettle corn and funnel cakes. You could easily spend an entire day exploring every booth at the market. Yet, after walking a while, we continued to head east on I-40 towards Greensboro.
Our next stop was our reservation at the SKYWILD ropes course, which is part of the Greensboro Science Center. Because capacity is limited, buying your tickets for SKYWILD online in advance is highly encouraged. We arrived 45 minutes early (per their recommendation) for our time spot. We came dressed in athletic clothes and tennis shoes. SKYWILD will allow you to take your cell phone/camera with you to a certain point. Though, it will need to either be placed with your water bottle at the bottom of the course, or with your items that will be securely locked in an assigned locker (the lockers are small, so bring just the necessities.)
SKYWILD is open to children and adults ages 8 and older (children who are ages 8 and 9 must be accompanied by someone 16 years and older). Children 10 to 16 are allowed on the course by themselves (with an adult present). Reservations allow participants up to two hours to try the different courses.
Before we started, one of the ropes course employees showed us how to securely fasten our harnesses, helmets, and gloves. Then they walked us through the safety protocols of the course. Our group then headed to a treehouse-type structure, where more ropes course employees were located. Every course they offer begins from this base (so when you complete a course, you will come back to the base to begin another.) Every participant must complete a beginner-level course before trying an intermediate or advanced course.
This was the first ropes course my son and I have ever been on, so we stayed on the beginner level, which was still admittedly challenging, but yet exhilarating and fun! Safely harnessed in, we crossed over swaying rope bridges and swinging boards to get from one platform to the next to complete our course. When my son became nervous during his initial attempt, one of the patient ropes course employees walked with him to help show him what to do. By the end he was having a blast! The zipline was his favorite part of the course. This was a fun and physical activity for us to do together, and I was so proud of his bravery!
A reservation at SKYWILD also allows you entrance to the Greensboro Science Center on the same day. After our ropes course experience, we began our tour of the center. The museum has an aquarium exhibit full of sharks, fish, seahorses, penguins, otters, and the like. You can view and learn about dinosaurs in their Prehistoric Passages exhibit. Venturing back outside, the center has a sizeable zoo, where you can see such animals as a Komodo Dragon, peacocks and birds, gibbons, lemurs, tigers, and wolves. My son loved playing in the Kiwanisaurus Treehouse Adventure, which is similar to a (secure and child-friendly) ropes course for little ones.
We ate lunch at the Meerkat Café, located in the museum. It offers drinks, salads, sandwiches, snacks/chips, hot dogs, fries, nachos, cookies, and such kid-friendly staples as pizza and chicken nuggets. We hit the souvenir shop (aptly named the “Tricera-shop”) before leaving, where my son selected a stuffed Komodo Dragon to take home (his favorite animal of the day.)
Needless to say, we both crashed hard when we got home after our full day of adventures, but the memories we made today were priceless. Future excursions to Guilford County will definitely be in our family’s future!
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