Yes, I never understood the beach culture of southern Cal, when its too dang cold to get in the water!!
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Try Maine on the east coast. Never been so cold in my life. Meanwhile Southerners wonât get in a pool that isnât bath water⌠I guess everyone acclimates to their own situation.
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Yes, my wife had a strict no pool under 85 rule.
I swam in the ocean in Maine earlier this summer. Can confirm it is very cold.
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Grew up in Maine. You can really only swim in the ocean in July and August (it hasnât warmed up enough in June to be comfortable yet, but people do it anyway). It was all I knew, so you can imagine how blown away I was by my first swim off the Carolina coast.
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Apparently England has their own can-opener bridge, but do they have t-shirts about it like Raleigh does??
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@GucciLittlePig, t-shirts? Please tell me more.
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House of Swank has made various t-shirts about it (like this example).
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This is something that would never make it to Raleigh haha. But this thing looks insane! Vegas is building the worlds largest sphere. Not sure how Iâve never heard of this project until today, itâs been under construction since 2018. Also if youâre interested in amazing construction projects around the world, check out this Youtube channel, itâs fascinating.
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Thereâs an entire subreddit devoted to these. Itâs a global phenomenon.
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Yep! The best thing is the subreddit /r/11foot8 itself is named after the one over in Durham.
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Pretty cool. But would the worlds largest sphere, be the world itself? Just sayinâ
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Perfect haircut of that truck - I guess they can now advertise they have open-truck shipping. I did notice they were also running the red light. Dip stick.
The world isnât a sphere, though; it is wider around the equator.
11foot8.com yet the sign says 12â4"
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Looks like it was raised by 8 inches recently. From the subredditâs sidebar FAQ
The canopener bridge is an old railroad trestle in Durham, NC, that originally had a clearance of 11 feet and 8 inches (3.6 meters) over Gregson St. In 2019, it was raised an additional 8 inches and now stands at 12 feet 4 inches (3.76 meters).
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Plus just kept right on moving afterwards. Didnât even stop.
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Why then did we not try to build PNC Arena ten years earlier so we could get and more importantly keep an NBA team - and I think the current issues the NBA has in Charlotte now can tie into the two fallow years and poor decision on all sides?
Why then did we not build an NFL stadium in the early 1990s when we had three college stadiums we could use as a temporary venue versus having to have the team schlep out to Clemson for their first year as the Panthers did?
Why then has light rail or a streetcar never been an option here? Look at what itâs done for Charlotte and what it would do for here.
And MLS, justâŚMLS. The perfect market for that sport on all metrics, shoved under the bus for its in-state rival. And with
I want all these things. Every cent of it would be money well spent. We are just languishing while Charlotte is making waves and getting somehwere. Iâm not content with the status quo, are yâall?
Raleigh has a decision to make: Does it level up to be at minimum like the Charlottes and Cincinnatis and St. Louises and Columbuses of the world? Does it make a hard push to become the Boston or Seattle of the South? Or do we just accept our fate of being Richmond, Providence, Albany, or (ha) Hartford with a single pro team?
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Thereâs a lot of stuff in this post that belongs in other threads on this fine website rather than the one for showing off things from other cities (the entirety of it, actually), but I am very happy with how things are progressing in Raleigh. So happy in fact that I declined the opportunity to live in Charlotte and chose to live in Raleigh instead! Raleigh is a great city! 
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Specifically to your NBA and NFL points, the population of the Triangle circa 1990 was less than a million IIRC, nobody in their right mind would put a major league team in a region with that few people. Obviously weâve grown tremendously, and maybe you could argue someone shouldâve had the foresight to plan for that, but honestly thatâs what Peter Karmanos did when he moved the Hartford Whalers here to become the Hurricanes. Pretty sure nobody in the Triangle was desperate for an NHL franchise, but he saw that this was a good market to place a bet on and the rest is history.
I get where youâre coming from with your posts but I would caution trying to compare us to legacy rust belt cities like Cincinnati and St. Louis because itâs really apples and oranges. Those cities have decades of a leg up on us because of larger populations during the major expansion of pro sports in the 60s (when there were rival leagues like the AFL, ABA, and WHA to put teams in every city that could support one) and there are huge legacy corporations, empires really, that help bring sports and other culture to their citiesâŚthink of Budweiser in St. Louis.
The peer cities we are going up against are booming sun belt metros like Nashville, Austin, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas. While itâs correct that we have fewer pro sports than those cities (and as a longtime supporter of the MLB Raleigh effort, Iâd like that to change), that and fixed-guideway transit are really the only two areas where we struggle to keep up. When it comes to jobs, quality of life, restaurants, arts, entertainment, museums, etc. we are right there with the best of them.
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