Welcome to the RHL NealLord! Great to see you passing on and sharing this awesome hobby with your kids. There are definitely spectacular things and probably better things to be found the closer you get to the mountains, but Wake County has the advantage at least for now of being a fast growing place and thus construction is non-stop.  Obviously all this construction is the source of many of my finds.

Check out the upcoming trip to the Burgin mine I posted in the General section:  http://rockhoundlounge.com/cgi-bin/yabb252/YaBB.pl?num=1461870649.  If you want to network with some rockhounds, receive some great tips, and places to hunt come on out and say hi.