All this doughnut talk reminds me of growing up in Florida in the 70’s. On Saturday mornings my parents would give me money and I would ride my bike a mile, maybe 1.5 miles to the doughnut shop in the local strip mall and bring back a dozen doughnuts of my choosing. We moved out of Florida in '79 so I couldn’t have been more than 8-9 years old. It was a good deal for my folks to get hot doughnuts delivered to the house and it made me feel like I was contributing to the greater good.
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There was a time when you could send your kids to get your cigarettes - though I maybe remembering the summer we spent in Guadalajara, Mexico.
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My two year old daughter will bring me Old Milwaukee from the fridge.
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Tastes as great as its name. 
My daughter, who gets so excited on buses that Indy Week literally once wrote a story about it, isn’t old enough to use the bus unsupervised yet, but I really hope she and her younger brother get to be regular bus riders when they’re teens. And if a city has a fast, frequent, reliable, safe, and comfortable public transit system connecting the urban core to the outlying areas, it opens up such a world of possibilities for teens. Put 'em on a bus and let 'em ride out to Crabtree Valley Mall or North Hills or a concert venue or wherever Kids These Days like to go for fun, and they can ride the bus back home instead of mom and dad having to drive them places.
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I remember at least one occasion where I was maybe 7-8 years old my dad sent me up to the corner store with some cash to buy him some pipe tobacco. Times have certainly changed.
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I never said such. It’s what the parents want. If a SFH makes their life easier with kids then that choice is made.
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Yeah this is totally what I want for my son when he’s in his teens. Go bike to Krispy Kreme or something if you’re feeling it! I can’t imagine how much my best friend from childhood and I would have got up to in our area. As it was we explored every inch of his Apex suburb, but we had to wait til we had cars to get donuts.
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Just catching up on this thread but I wanted to chime in with my experience as a teenager who spent a lot of their time downtown.
I lived Willow Spring, an unincorporated area outside of Fuquay, and went to school at Exploris Middle and Longleaf School of the Arts when it was in the building next to Marbles. My parents both worked in North Raleigh so it was convenient for them to swing by downtown after work to pick us up, but it was still about a 45 minute commute each way for me and closer to an hour for them. I got really good at doing my homework in the car.
Both of my parents had pretty demanding jobs so they wouldn’t get out of work until 6 pm a lot of days. At first my parents taught my brother and me how to use the bus system so we could get to their offices and do homework there. Apparently other parents would be bewildered when they were told by my parents that we rode the city buses, but my mom would tell them that if she survived the city buses of San Juan, Puerto Rico in the eighties, we would be fine on the Raleigh city buses.
As you can imagine, chilling in the break room of a stuffy office building was not the vibe, so eventually (when I was in eighth grade and my brother in sixth) our parents told us that we could just hang out in downtown until they were done with work. They would load a debit card up with some money and we could go to a coffee shop or whatever to pass the time. My dad made the case that even if we got a venti caramel mocha frappuccino or whatever every day, it would still be less than sending us to an after school program at the Y.
We would also walk to the museums or Oberlin Library, places with free wifi and AC/heat that weren’t that crowded (as many of the coffee shops got). Sometimes friends from school would join us and we would explore the parks and shops with them or go to the houses of the ones that lived in oakwood, stopping by krispy kreme or the person st pharmacy for a snack. A lot of times, when our parents picked us up we would stay downtown and go to a restaurant or, if it was a friday, go to First Friday or any of the many festivals or to the imax to watch a movie.
After all this we would go back home and do … nothing. Because there was nothing to do. It would usually be 7 by the time we got home and there would be just enough time to make dinner and shower before we got tired and fell asleep in front of the TV. None of our friends lived near us and didn’t come to visit because we lived an hour away and ugh that was too long of a drive for them, pass. Any sports or other activities we could have participated in (or groceries or restaurants, for that matter) were still quite a distance away and we were all tired of being in a car for a total of 10 hours that week at a minimum so we would also do nothing but sit in front of the tv on the weekends. This was the case even when I had a license and my own car.
All this to say, I felt like I lived two lives, one in the city and one in a suburb of a suburb. The one in the city felt much richer and I have many more memories of it than I do of the one at “home”. It made me want to become more active in Fuquay-Varina’s municipal happenings so I could influence their trajectory to become more like the vibrant and interesting place I found Raleigh to be, but, ultimately, now that I have control over where I live, moving to an apartment in downtown where I don’t need to drive my car if I don’t want to and have access to all the culture I enjoyed as a teen is a no-brainer.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
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Did your parents ever consider moving closer to DTR?
My son has a friend from middle school whose family lives in Willow Springs - man it’s out there. I know they can afford a larger house out that way, which I guess justifies it for them? I would’nt be happy with all that driving.
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Yeah, both my parents separately moved to north Raleigh, but that was after my brother and I had already moved out to college. Both of their commutes are like five minutes now. They definitely hated all of the driving as well. They were originally located in Willow Spring because my mom had a job in Benson and my dad had the job he still has now. For the first couple weeks of sixth grade she was still at that job before getting the one in north raleigh. Sometimes, my dad had to go in to work wayyyy too early for the kids to arrive at school so she sometimes had to bring us to downtown raleigh before backtracking to her benson office. I think that total one-way commute time pushed two hours sometimes.
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good info. while i wasnt in willow springs my folks were dependent on raleigh transit for nearly all trips and i spent many an hour in downtown raleigh meeting up with one of them, waiting for a bus, or on a retail shopping trip (decades ago). from a youngsters perspective downtown was always curious and interesting. at 8 years old i was riding raleigh busses solo…drag a skateboard along and it was wonderful independence.
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This relates to people raising furry kids in Raleigh. It could possibly go in another thread instead.
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Sneaky little way to get a bar embedded in an Old RalE neighborhood…It’s buried back there by the artists studios…Neat concept. Hope it’s a success.
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Bar serving liquor and beer in a dog park. Like we need a bunch of drunk dogs running around. SMDH.
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I think the world could use more drunk dogs than drunk people. Would be pretty funny
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