Activities in Raleigh

For more than a decade, the staffers of Interskate Roller Skating have welcomed visitors of all ages to glide around their facility?s indoor rink on rented skates, score tickets from arcade machines, and celebrate birthdays by chugging pitchers of soda. The family-owned rink offers open skate Friday?Sunday and regularly hosts special events. Interskate also hosts fitness classes for kids and adults in partnership with Xtreme Sports, offering courses in roller hockey, indoor soccer, and indoor soccer on roller skates.

Carafe's micro-wineries brew and bottle their own grape blood on-site, harvested from the fruit of the world's many vine varieties. Tapping into the thrills of kiddie chemistry experiments, the wine-masters at Carafe custom-mix each bottle of inebriation-fuel at their creation station, imbuing brews with the extra love and care that enables them to mature into responsible citizens of stomachs everywhere. Not to be outshone by the contents, bottle labels are similarly customized, bearing personalized messages from bottler to bottlee. Label designs from the Raleigh wine-wranglers are printed on water-resistant gloss paper, ensuring that your birthday, anniversary, or Tuesday wishes are clearly conveyed. The stock does vary according to availability, so before promising the gift of pinot, make sure you call or stop in to check on your favorite varieties.

Cheer on the NC State Wolfpack as they burrow into Carter-Finley Stadium to dazzle more than 57,000 fanatic wolfpackers through a display of passes, tackles, touchdowns, and a touch of intermission tap dancing. This deal is valid for the best available seats that are not in the student section, so check out the stadium seating to know whether to paint your chest with butter or margarine. Tickets must be redeemed on game day at the Carter-Finley Stadium box office on the west side of the stadium or via turtle carrier.

The resourceful staff at The Collectors Gallery, the sister-store of The Mahler, scours the corners of North Carolina for finely wrought jewelry, ceramics, and sculptures crafted by a slew of talented artists. Stock kitchen cabinets with kaleidoscopically glazed, hand-tossed tea bowls ($20 each) or one of Ken Sedberry's petite pitchers, the perfect size for containing cream or syrup ($40). AraLeigh earrings by Leigh Griffin Harris come in numerous styles that include smoky quartz, black pearls, and orange agate ($25), and Tiffany Coley's enamel-heart necklace makes a great forget-me-not for your favorite person or internal organ ($36).

The formula for a perfect girl's night out is reinvented at the Pretty Muddy 5K. The staples are there: girlfriends ready to have fun, Fans of Mario Kart know Rainbow Road as a glow-in-the-dark racecourse in outer space. So do fans of ABC's The Bachelor, only theirs is located on earth and strewn with more celebrities than turtle shells. To them, it's the series of inflatable arches that flashed hypnotically around Juan Pablo and Kat as they hurtled through the Electric Run. Seth Rogen, Carmen Electra, and a pink-wigged Vanessa Hudgens have also been spotted among the global event's hordes of runners and walkers. Rainbow Road is just one of many "lands" that make up Electric Run's luminescent 5K. Any given Electric Run course contains five to seven of these brightly lit zones, each decorated according to its theme with neon trees, hanging umbrellas, phosphorescent cacti, and cascading fountains. Each land also matches the surroundings with its own soundtrack: upbeat and energizing for the wilder areas, calming and melodic for the surreal ones. Once the sun sets, participants travel through them all at their preferred pace. Everyone arrives at the same final destination, however?a DJ-propelled after party that keeps the night illuminated until the thunderous ka-chunk of the sun's timecard.

The laws of gravity are said to be universal, but they don't apply when you're exploring 15,000 square feet of trampolines. At Launching Pad Trampoline Park, one can easily jump up towards the ceiling, bound at an angle, or even flip into pits of foam cubes. Though NASA turned the moon into a private golf course, visitors can play their own bouncy games at Launching Pad's two dodgeball trampoline courts, four basketball dunk lanes, and dedicated children's court. Yet for the massive amount of space they cover, springy trampolines account for less than half of the space inside Launching Pad Trampoline Park. The complex encompasses an arcade with 32 games ?including ski ball? and a full redemption counter, as well as Lazer Frenzy, an enclosed maze guarded by moving laser beams. Inside the XD 6D Motion Theatre, motion seats, surround sound, G-force acceleration, and other special effects immerse audiences in outer-space roller coasters and other adventures on the 15-foot screen.