furniture shopping in Charlotte, North Carolina

 

Hickory Furniture Mart

We are spending the weekend at The Ballantyne Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina. A member of the Luxury Collection, guests can receive STARS amenities by booking through a travel advisor affiliated with a STARS agency. This gets you daily breakfast for two and a $100 resort credit, all for the same "regular" rate you can book online. We have been upgraded into a lovely Executive Suite on the top floor with a prime view of the 18 hole golf course, soon to be transformed into a vast public park with a lake and recreational offerings for guests and local residents as well.

North Carolina is renown for its furniture industry, and we stopped at Hickory Furniture Mart on our drive to Charlotte. Four floors of furniture showrooms under one roof, they promise "North Carolina pricing with incredible discounts of 65-80% off most standard retail pricing" ... and in fact we got great pricing. We shopped at Amish Oak and Cherry (the store pictured at the bottom left of the photo above) and were impressed with the quality and pricing of their furniture. We bought some pieces that were priced at about 50% of retail with an additional 15% discount. Most everything they sell is hand crafted for you, constructed with your choice of wood (cherry, maple, oak, walnut, etc.), finished with the stain and varnish of your choice, and customized with the drawer pulls you choose.

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copyright (c) 2021 by Ourisman Travel LLC.  All rights reserved. We provide Virtuoso and other Preferred Partner amenities as an affiliate of Brownell, a Virtuoso® Member.

from the Berkeley Hills to the Blue Ridge Parkway

view from the Blue Ridge Parkway (c) 2020 by David Ourisman, all rights reserved

Both an exciting and a sad announcement, I've lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 28 years. I moved here in 1992 to pursue a Ph.D. at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, earning my doctorate in 1997. After devoting more than a decade to academia, I decided to pursue another one of my passions. In 2006, literally on my 55th birthday, I began a new adventure, a travel business. Here in Berkeley I built my business, and Team Ourisman has expanded over the years to (currently) a team of four, each of us working remotely from our own home offices in Maryland, Arkansas, and California.

And now Claire and I are moving to North Carolina. The Bay Area has grown more crowded in the decades that I've lived here. Traffic is getting worse. And the climate ... well, it's become perceptibly warmer and drier. I used to wear sweatshirts all year round; I've worn short sleeves every day this summer. It used to rain a LOT in the winter, packing the Sierras with snow, but we're living with droughts. Climate change is most assuredly real, and California has been impacted severely by firestorms. Starting earlier and lasting longer, they have burned more acres each and every year. Our air during firestorms becomes so unhealthy that we can't go for our daily walks in our beloved Tilden Park. So we've decided to move ... and it will happen sometime around the end of November.

Asheville, NC will become our new home and the new home office of Ourisman Travel. Absolutely nothing will change for our clients ... the same email and phone numbers will work as before. Because we have been working remotely with a virtual Team Office for a decade now, it's second nature for us to work as a team while socially distanced. So besides the fact that I'll be packing, moving, and unpacking, it will still be business as usual. My Team will cover for me when I need the help!

What will change are the views. Instead of the Berkeley Hills and their beautiful vistas of San Francisco Bay, we will now delight in beautiful views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The forests surrounding the Parkway are administered by the National Park Service, and they literally begin in our new back yard. It will be just a half mile hike up the hill to the parkway itself, and I'm looking forward to some sunrise photography once I learn the best spots.

It's so very sad to leave so many wonderful friends behind, especially Epworth United Methodist Church that has been my family and spiritual community for 28 years. But we'll all be able to stay connected through Travel Horizons and Facebook. Send me a friend request to follow along in all our new adventures.

Click here to sign up for the Ourisman Travel Newsletter.

copyright (c) 2020 by Ourisman Travel LLC.  All rights reserved. We provide Virtuoso and other Preferred Partner amenities as an affiliate of Brownell, a Virtuoso® Member.