I Have Come For Your Fried Chickens

After so many days and miles and destinations, the end of the trip being in sight is a funny feeling. Pulling into Durham was exciting for the friends (and food) we would meet, but knowing our ultimate destination was just a five hour drive away was odd.

Compounded by our arrival at the final campground of the trip. This place has bedeviled us for weeks. We have stayed at probably 40 campgrounds in the last two months, and this one and this one alone required literal weeks of back and forth by email and phone to confirm a spot. Imagine our disappointment when it proved to be the least campground in addition to the last.

After dropping the Airstream at said sub-par campground, we headed into charming Durham, North Carolina. Durham's one of many American cities we've passed through where the signs of urban atrophy and, in some cases like Durham, renewal are everywhere. In this case, expansive brick buildings that used to serve booming textile and tobacco industries that are now hipster lofts, medical research facilities, and one particularly groovy selvage denim shop doing their work on Singer sewing machines retrieved from the region's 1920s-era looms.

Durham was also home to what was known as Black Wall Street, a section of downtown that was for a time home to several of the largest black-owned enterprises in the country which in turn generated a thriving middle class African American community.

Just down the street we had our first encounter with the region's cuisine at a place called Littler, where I enjoyed the first of many consecutive fried chicken dishes. The next morning we were off to local cult favorite Monuts for fried chicken and pickle biscuits, which was so good we went back again the next day.

While in Durham (and a quick dash next door to Raleigh) we got to catch up with friends from pages of our past, including a couple Zeynep worked with in Bosnia ten years ago and friends who used to live in our neighborhood in DC (and who produced a baby two days before our arrival, nearly upending plans to eat fried chicken together!). The two couples have of course had different experiences living in the area, but the consensus seems to be the people are friendly and the food is good. We concur.