Greenville

Greenville is the capital of North Carolina's inner coastal plain in everything but name — a tobacco-market town founded on the Tar River in the 1770s that bet on education and medicine and won. About 87,500 people live in the city, 175,000 in Pitt County, and two institutions dominate: East Carolina University, founded as a teachers' school in 1907 and now the fourth-largest in the UNC system with more than 29,000 students, and ECU Health Medical Center, the second-largest hospital in the state and the teaching flagship for the Brody School of Medicine. Locals call it the Emerald City, and on football Saturdays the whole place turns purple and gold.

Uptown, the compact downtown, is where the city socialises: Dickinson Avenue and Fifth Street carry the student bars, breweries and late-night slices, the Greenville Museum of Art anchors the cultural side with a strong North Carolina collection, and the Town Common spreads a lawn amphitheatre down to the Tar River. The South Tar River Greenway threads nine miles of paved path through the city, and River Park North adds 324 acres of ponds, trails and a science-and-nature centre on the north bank. Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium holds 50,000 for Pirates football — a genuinely big-time atmosphere in a city this size — and Minges Coliseum handles basketball and the concert calendar. The city's flood story also produced its favourite football legend: the 1999 Pirates, displaced by Floyd's waters, beat ninth-ranked Miami on a borrowed field in Raleigh.

Beyond campus, Greenville works: Grady-White Boats, Thermo Fisher and Hyster-Yale run major plants, and the medical district west of town employs thousands. The visitor's day splits easily between the museum and Uptown, a greenway ride or river paddle — the Tar is broad, slow and cypress-fringed below town — and a game or show in the evening. Little Washington, the pretty Pamlico River town 25 minutes east, is the standard side trip.

The food scene is student-fed and barbecue-proud: eastern North Carolina whole-hog with vinegar-pepper sauce is the local religion, with landmark pits in and around the county, and Uptown adds taquerias, ramen and a growing set of chef-run spots around Dickinson Avenue. The Dickinson Avenue corridor keeps adding small plates and cocktail spots aimed at the hospital-and-university crowd rather than the dorms. Nightlife is a college town's — loudest on Fifth Street after home games, quiet and local in the summer lull.

US-264 (future I-587) runs west to Raleigh in about 80 minutes, and Pitt-Greenville Airport (PGV) connects through Charlotte. There is no Amtrak in town — Wilson, 40 minutes west, is the nearest station — and GREAT buses cover the city routes. Hotels cluster along the Greenville Boulevard and Arlington corridors and near the hospital. The city's honest caveat is water: Hurricane Floyd's 1999 Tar River flood is living memory, and low riverside spots still take on water in big storms.

Springs and autumns are long and mild, summers hot and humid, winters short. Time a visit to a Pirates home weekend in the fall if you can — Freeboot Fridays, the Uptown pep rallies before home games, are the city at full volume — or to PirateFest in April. Give Greenville one to two days. On the road it is the natural base for the inner Banks: Washington and Bath east toward the Pamlico, New Bern an hour southeast, and the Outer Banks ferries beyond.