- Hi everyone, welcome to "North Carolina Weekend."

I'm Deborah Holt Noel and this week we are exploring Lake Norman.

[boat humming] This area, just 20 miles north of Charlotte, is a weekenders paradise.

There's so much to do here on the lake, but I also explored three lake towns on the northern side of the lake, Cornelius, Huntersville and Davidson and each one has its own personality.

A great way to get oriented is to stop by the offices of Visit Lake Norman in Cornelius.

Here you can pick up brochures, maps, enough information to send you on your way.

Lake Norman is the largest manmade lake in North Carolina.

It was created by Duke Power in the early sixties to provide hydroelectric power and even drinking water for the Charlotte region.

This lake is huge, over 50 square miles, and as Mark and Megan can show you, it offers a whole lot of fun.

Of the three towns surrounding Lake Norman, Cornelius probably has the most lake frontage.

If you want a fun place to take the kids, head to Ramsey Creek Park with its lifeguarded beaches.

But if you're in the mood for arts and entertainment, head to the Cain Center for the Arts.

Let's check it out.

- The town had an idea and the public approved it through a public bond package in 2013 that they would love to see downtown economic development happen in the form of an arts and community center.

Cain Center for the Arts, our mission statement is to provide exceptional visual arts, performing arts and social experiences to the Lake Norman region.

So we really take a full multi-pronged approach to that.

Obviously, we have a wonderful theater space that presents wonderful performing arts series in the fall and the spring every year.

Each year we present upwards of 35 to 40 performances.

We also have rotating exhibit space here where you can enjoy wonderful work by North Carolina, South Carolina and southeastern regional artists.

We have that commitment and we also have a very vibrant educational program.

We have a full ceramics center that operates year round, that operates ceramics classes for adults and youth.

We opened up January 3rd, 2023.

So in just about the seven months we've been open, we've gotten a great community response.

Folks are starting to realize that this is their spot and that was the goal, this center belongs to the community.

- Cornelius has a popular new social district so you can pick up a drink here at Thigs and then just walk on over to the Cain Center for the Arts.

I love the ambiance here and they're perfectly crafted cocktails.

Fabulous.

Oh my gosh.

What I find interesting about Huntersville is the mix of activities.

This former milltown is now home to a nature preserve, historic sites and even shopping.

This is Birkdale Village, a really neat mixed use development with housing, shops, great restaurants, even a movie theater.

My friends tell me this is one of the busiest retail venues in the area, but it really feels more like a village.

One great place to take the kids is Latta Nature Preserve and Quest Center.

- Our mission is to serve as a gateway into the nature preserve.

We really want to get people excited and comfortable with being outdoors.

We get a lot of people who are driving by and they just see us and they stop in 'cause they don't know what we are and they come inside and they see we have all of these exhibits with the live animals that you can find right here at Latta Nature Preserve.

It's a self-guided exhibit hall so you can come through and you can look at everything at your own pace.

We have a lot of activities that are good for all ages.

At the Nature Preserve itself, you could easily spend all weekend exploring the nature preserve and not see everything we have to offer.

- Just inside the Latta Nature Preserve is the Carolina Raptor Center and I believe they have someone they want me to meet.

Kate, who is this?

- Hi.

- Hi.

- This is Watson.

- Hi, Watson.

- And Watson is an American Kestrel and he is one of our ambassador birds.

So an American Kestrel is a small type of falcon and falcons are known for their speed.

You may have heard of a Peregrine Falcon before, the fastest animal in the world.

They can catch birds in midair and the smaller falcons... [Watson wings fluttering] Oh, the smaller falcons can actually catch bugs in midair.

So we like to feed them what they would naturally eat.

So he is snacking on some worms this morning.

- [Deborah] Well, so tell me, how many birds do you treat here at the center?

- Yeah, so at the center we have two parts to what we do.

We have our rehabilitation hospital and then we have our zoo.

The rehabilitation hospital takes in between 800 to a thousand patients every year and that's just raptors.

So that's just hawks, eagles, owls, falcons, vultures.

So the number one reason we get birds into our hospital is car collisions.

So they get hit by cars and what we've found is the reason for that is they're hunting by the side of the road.

Mice and rats and squirrels are being drawn to the side of the road because mostly of roadside litter and it's a lot of biodegradable stuff.

Banana peels, apple cores.

People throw it out the window thinking, "Hey, I'm gonna feed something on the side of the road."

Well they are, and what they don't know is that there's been a hawk sitting in a tree waiting for an unsuspecting squirrel to run up and be distracted by that apple core and so then they fly across the road and oftentimes they'll get hit.

- [Deborah] That's great advice, Kate.

Can you tell me about the Carolina Raptor Trail?

- Yeah, so that's the other part of what we do, we're a zoo.

So people can come out and visit us and the birds that live on the trail, their job is to help people fall in love with raptors.

That's what we want.

We want people to come out here and get an opportunity to see the birds that live in their world, but also to see birds that live in other parts of the world.

So we have non-native species so that guy that was making all that noise.

[bird squawking] You would not see him in your backyard, you see him at the Raptor Center, unless you have the opportunity to travel to South America.

So we have birds that live here to help people fall in love with raptors and to give us a platform to talk about global conservation.

- [Deborah] What's next for the Raptor Center?

- Exciting things.

There's a new building that's already built, it's called Quest and it is going to be our front door.

- Well, I've definitely fallen in love with this little guy.

Thank you so much for bringing him out.

I can't wait to explore more of the center.

[bagpipe music] The Scotch and Irish settled huge swaths of land around what became Lake Norman and one of the large farms in the area was Rural Hill first established in 1760.

Today Rural Hill is part of the Mecklenburg County Parks Association, but it remains a great place to celebrate Scottish culture with its highland cows and, of course, the Loch Norman Highland Games.

- Some of our Scottish traditions that we still carry on today would be first footing, which is on on the first day of the year, January 1st.

What the Scots did was they got up and they would walk the boundaries of their land to make sure there was no trespassers on the property.

So we get up and we have a little walk.

We're not as concerned about trespassers as we are lunch, but still the plan is there.

The music is fabulous at the Highland Games.

We have, of course, the piping and drumming competition that goes on Saturday and the big games are, of course, the caver toss, which, you're tossing the pole and the sheath toss where you're tossing the bag of hay over the line and you got the hammer throw, which is the great big lead or steel ball on the end of a stick and about that long and you swinging it around, hope it goes in the right direction.

We do have the dog trials in the fall, Scottish Border Collies come out and they compete.

It is an internationally sanctioned event.

It's a family fan favorite for the dog lovers in the area.

- And for even more excitement, head to Huntersville every fall for the Carolina Renaissance Festival and Artisan Market.

This is not a typical weekend event, it runs every Saturday and Sunday for eight weeks and it's a fun-filled step back in time to the 16th century and the mythical village of Fairhaven.

This is the Hugh Torance House and Store and it is now the oldest standing store in North Carolina.

Back in the early 18 hundreds, this store was the commerce site for the entire region.

Remember that Charlotte only had a population of about 200 and was barely hanging on, but the region north of Charlotte, which is where I'm standing right now, was actually much wealthier and more established.

Abigail, who was Hugh Torance?

- So Hugh Torance immigrated over to the United States from Ireland in the 18th century and came down from Philadelphia, we think he was an indentured servant, and came down and settled in Roan County and then made his way to this location in 1779.

He started out as a traveling salesman and then found that actually having a store was a good thing and so he started building up his store.

- [Deborah] Who is James Torance?

- So James Torance was the son of Hugh.

James, as the family prospered with the store, they did add planting to what the family did and so they became more prosperous and they built what is known today as Cedar Grove next door.

- Abigail, what can you share about the enslaved people who did live here?

- Before the house and before they really got into cotton, they did not have that many.

I think there was around 30, but once they did introduce the cotton and they the plantation started expanding, at one time they had more than a hundred enslaved people on the site.

The bricks of this property were all created by the enslaved people and so this is actually a hand print of one of those enslaved people that pushed this into the brick mold and an example of the bricks that were made here on this property.

- That's incredible.

- Yeah.

- Right now I'm in downtown Davidson, a charming college town with a bookstore, coffee house, soda shop, restaurants and more.

But right now I'm gonna head across the street to the campus of Davidson College where I hear there's a public art and sculpture garden that you've just gotta see.

- The fact that we have a Rodan that we share with our visitors on campus tours with our students just really plays to our strengths and shows the excellence of art that we have through the ages.

Around campus, we have 19 different public works of art that people can see.

We have an online tour, a self-guided tour, that people can take and really the theme is belonging.

Art from around the world, art from different communities, different expressions that are meant to inspire on our liberal arts campus.

One of our pieces is by the Barcelona artist Plensa who used eight different alphabets and pieced them together for this thinking man and we have students who said to me, "I first knew that I belonged at Davidson "when I saw my alphabet on that piece."

That's amazing.

- Time to settle in for the night and I picked the Davidson Village Inn.

- It's always our dream to own a small boutique property.

We just fell in love with the town and the people and it just took off from there.

- [Deborah] Moriano, what are some of the special touches that you've added to make this your own?

- We added a piano so we could have a pianist here once in a while, we added the wine station so guests could come down here, have a glass of wine, enjoy this atmosphere, but then the rooms were spruced up so we added a little more technology.

We have Nest Thermostats, which are a lot easier for guests to handle, we repainted the room so there'd be fresher and more neutral colors and then we went ahead and we added our meeting wine tasting room.

So just little things so that people wouldn't feel like, "Oh my God, this is a luxury property."

We wanted them to feel like this is a comfortable property that is well located and what really helps us stand out is our hospitality.

That's what we really care about.

- [Deborah] And I'm excited about the breakfast.

Tell me about that.

- We are a really healthy conscious breakfast, the way we set it up, so you'll find a variety of yogurts, you're gonna find fruits, you're gonna find cereals, you're gonna find a coffee and tea station, you're gonna find some locally baked goods and you're gonna find that joy and whoever's here in the morning is gonna give you tremendous service.

So you'll be the judge.

You'll tell me tomorrow about breakfast.

- Well, Mariano, this is a beautiful inn.

I am so excited for you to host me here and I can't wait to see more of Davidson.

After touring Davidson's campus, you might be hungry.

Let's meet Joe Kindred, a Davidson native and James Beer nominated chef.

He and his wife Katie opened Kindred a few years ago and it's become a real destination for foodies.

- I think the main reason we chose to open a restaurant in Davidson and specifically call it Kindred, was because of how fiercely loyal the community is.

We wanted to have a neighborhood restaurant that was different than a steakhouse or an Italian restaurant or things like that.

We didn't wanna pigeonhole ourselves and label it and say, "Well we're farm to table "or we are Italian or we're European or whatever."

We wanted to be able to have almost an open recipe book to be able to create whatever it is, types of food that we were excited about or in that moment.

We just say our number one rule is you gotta break the milk bread and you gotta share.

It's almost like the boundaries are broken down.

It's like, all right, you're forced to break bread with whoever it is that you're across.

Whether that's your significant other, whether it's your neighbor, whether it's a friend whether it's a business meeting.

You literally have to somehow, some way, cohesively break that bread and I think like that just kind of like unbuttons your top button, it breaks all the walls down and it's also a gift from us so it's free, complimentary on us, and it's the first thing that hits the table and that's intentional.

So I think the only rule of Kindred is sharing.

- I've been hearing about a new wine shop in Davidson so decided to stop by.

It's owned by Lindsey Williams, an attorney turned wine maker.

I can't wait to meet her.

Well Lindsey, that is quite a career move from attorney to winemaker.

Tell me a little bit about your journey.

- Yeah, so I had been a corporate attorney for a really long time and decided that I wanted to go into business for myself and so I'd always loved wine, traveled the world, going to different vineyards and visiting different wineries and so I decided to go and enroll in a wine making program and learn how to make wine.

So after learning how to make wine, I then started looking for a location to have my own winery right here in the Lake Norman area.

We love a Malbec because it's definitely a great gateway wine.

So for folks who don't typically like a red wine, a Malbec's nice and smooth, easy to drink and goes with a wide variety of food.

So we really wanted this to be approachable for people who come to the winery.

- It is, it's so mellow and there's no bite, it's not sweet, but it's like I said, mellow.

It's a really good sipping, drinking wine, isn't it?

- [Lindsey] Yep, that's exactly what we wanted.

Glad you like it.

- I do.

- Lindsey, tell me about the pipes back here.

- Yes, so this building is historic and so the historic use of the building was an organ making shop called Blakely Oregon Builders.

So we like to keep the essence and the history of the space and we paint homage to the organ pipes here.

So many of the organs in churches in North Carolina and South Carolina were made right here years ago.

- Well the space is so cozy and lovely.

Is that pretty much what you were trying to achieve?

I understand people come from beyond the state just to visit.

- Yes, so we wanted this to be a place where people feel comfortable lounging and staying a while while they drink their wine.

- It is, it's pretty, it's calm, it's sophisticated and you did all this.

- I did.

[both laughing] - Well, cheers.

- Cheers.

- We're back in Cornelius for our final night in Lake Norman and I'm about to go on a boat ride with Carolina Cruising Charters.

Carolina Cruising Charters offers all kinds of boat excursions on Lake Norman from Sunset cruises to parties and events and every boat is helmed by a US Coast Guard licensed captain.

I had so much fun cruising on Lake Norman with my new friends and looking at all the amazing homes.

I'll definitely be coming back.

[upbeat music] This is Hello Sailor, another great restaurant by Joe and Katie Kindred with gorgeous views of Lake Norman and a terrific menu.

Perfect place to wind up my weekend at Lake Norman.

The visit Lake Norman Welcome Center is at 19900 West Catawba Avenue number 102 in Cornelius and they're open Monday through Friday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

For more information give them a call at [704] 987-3300 or visit them online at visitlakenorman.org.