Check Out The Charlotte Observer’s Article About Charlotte Third Places
Nerd Note: The gif above features the character Jim from the Disney movie Treasure Planet (2002), one of my all time favorites. When it came out, I was obsessed with its sense of adventure. Jim lived in a small town but had big dreams. He was longing, yearning, every day for a chance to see the universe, and when it came, he took full advantage of it. I’ve always been inspired by that to step out and explore. To me, exploring doesn’t have to be the kind of stuff that’d impress the social media crowd. America’s so big, I’ve done most of my exploring (so far) just by moving across the country from coast to coast. Treasure Planet flopped at the box office, but it has a special place in my heart. I remember they had really good McDonald’s Happy Meal toys for it, this was one of my favorites.
One of my personal passions is adventuring, and I don’t mean just the kind that requires traveling all about. Social media has convinced so many of us that you can only adventure when you book a trip to some destination city that everyone’s going to think you’re cool, cultured, and “well-traveled” for having gone to. I grew up poor, and only recently managed to make it to “there’s some disposable income for leisure” status in life, so I had to learn to adventure in place. No car, no flights, just my two feet and local public transportation. That’s how I explored.
I did that growing up in the greater Seattle area, during college in St. Louis, during internships in Omaha and Stamford, and I’ve kept the habit even now as a working professional with the ability to venture a bit further. Wherever I am, small town or big city, I’m going to look around. I’m going to try and check out every single place that interests me, and even ones that don’t, keeping notes and data points along the way. I’m the person in the friend group maintaining spreadsheets to organize to-do’s, stuff to watch, restaurants to try, all of it.
So, after moving to Charlotte during the pandemic, once things opened up, I did exactly that. I took full advantage of my remote work status to hang out anywhere and everywhere around the city. In 2024, I turned all that info into a website, Charlotte Third Places. I wrote about how I built the site in this post, although a lot has changed since then. Improving the site in my free time has become my go to hobby whenever I’ve got a spare moment.
All that said, the point is I got to chat with The Charlotte Observer about the project, how it was built, where the idea came from, my goals for it, and more. Check out the article below!
