About twenty Honors students spent Saturday 27 February in Chapel Hill as part of the Focus on Excellence series of academic and cultural events.

Honors students Destiny McDuffie and Christianna Van Dalsen greeted the assembly in the Rotunda, outlining for participants what they would see and do. What a great job they did!

In the morning, the Honors students visited the North Carolina Map Collection in Wilson Library. There were so many historic maps available for close inspection that it was a challenge to examine them all during our visit. Among the most interesting maps were the John Lawson map (1709) of his exploration of the Carolinas; and the 1775 Mouzon map which was so accurate that it was used by American, French, and British commanders during the Revolutionary War.

Honors students had their noon meal at restaurants up and down Franklin Street. One large group settled at Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe for a late breakfast and conversation. The timbers in the dining room came from an old Greek Orthodox church. Another lucky group found the Artisan Pizza Kitchen and pronounced it excellent.

After lunch, several Honors students headed to the Ackland Art Museum to view paintings by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Kallowitz, among others. A larger group met Dr Bill Schmidt, the MC physics professor, at the Morehead Planetarium, for an intro to the full-dome show, ‘Astronaut’. What are the effects of space travel on the human body? Will there ever be such a thing as a round-trip ticket to Mars? Can you name the two planets that appear nowadays in the Western sky just after sunset?

What a curious, congenial, and cheerful group of explorers!