The other two points of the Research Triangle make the obvious day trips. Chapel Hill, fifteen minutes west, offers the University of North Carolina campus, a small lively college-town main street, and the excellent Ackland Art Museum. Raleigh, half an hour east, is the state capital — the cluster of free state museums on Bicentennial Plaza is one of the great free attractions of the South-East.
Further afield, the small mountain town of Saxapahaw on the Haw River (forty minutes south-west) is a quietly thriving cultural and food destination, with the Saxapahaw General Store an unlikely culinary landmark. Hillsborough, twenty minutes north-west, is a Revolutionary War town with an intact eighteenth-century main street and the Eno River running through it.
For a longer weekend, the Outer Banks beaches are around three and a half hours east, and the Blue Ridge Mountains around Asheville are four hours west.