Yesterday, on my way back home, I decided to take a
diversion to find cheap gas for my car.
New Kent County usually has the cheapest gas prices on my daily route
and since I do not work in Richmond on Fridays, it was time to fill up the car
for the weekend. I decided to drive US
60 all the way to Williamsburg to look for cheap gas and then take the Colonial
Parkway the rest of the way.
New Kent County is an up and coming locality, it’s tucked in
between Richmond and the Hampton Roads area and it is slowly becoming a place
to live and commute from. As such it is
an example of contrast. You have areas
that are heavily build up and developed, expensive wineries and more poor/rural
areas. Today’s photograph is a prime
example of this. I drove by this
abandoned group of buildings, located right along US 60. As you can see it is completely abandoned and
someone even thought it was an excellent place to dump an old recliner. A friend of mine looked at the photograph and
was taken aback by what appears to be a fairly new metal roof on part of the
abandoned building. In other words
someone try to fix the place up but gave up mid-point. From the looks of it the building might have
been an old motel, or maybe just a few apartments.
Going a little further along US 60 you can find an expensive
sub-division. It is a prime example of
urban sprawl. The development is along
part of the Chickahominy River and it is really very nice. However, if you need groceries, you are
forced to drive at least 20 minutes or more down the road to find the nearest
grocery store in Toano. There is a
convenience store around the corner, but you pay more for less choice and lesser
quality.
As European I often still have a difficult time wrapping my
head around it all, but then I take the car to go grocery shopping at a
supermarket less than 5 minutes from my home.
I wish I could take the bike, but my excuse is that US 17 in York County
is too dangerous for bikes and that I would be foolish to ride there. Talking with our county’s planners we are
told this highway is a thoroughfare and not for bikes. Makes you wonder why all the stores are on
that street. But even if we bike, there is no bicycle
parking near the store.
Back to urban sprawl and New Kent County. I find this photograph is so darn indicative
of what is going on in many rural counties.
Some owners of desirable tracts of land are able to get rich and move
out of the counties by selling their land to developers, while others in the
county suffer. I am sure that the
establishment I took a picture of was a thriving county store/gas station that
employed a few people, but the big corporate world somehow out-competed
them. People had cars and could easily
drive to Walmart and other stores like that in the “big” town; closing these
county stores forever and leaving them to crumble to become evidence of a very
different past. They become blight of
the neighborhood and people become more cavalier about it. People loose pride in their surroundings, so
why drive to the sanitary dump when you can get rid of that old recliner right
there in that parking lot of the abandoned building? No it is not just New Kent, even here you see
mattresses just tossed out along the side of the road. What is society coming to if we do not appreciate
our surroundings, nature, and the places we live? As society we are poisoning ourselves by
fouling up the only place we can live, mother earth.
