Charlottesville (8/27/2014)

In my continuing report on my travels, one more picture of Charlottesville.  The students were back in town and we went in search of a cup of coffee. There is a Starbucks located right on university row and again it was a pleasure just to walk on a busy sidewalk with tables and students enjoying lunch.  Driving through Charlottesville I was amazed how bike friendly the place was.

I picked up my coffee, and the cup collapsed, burning my hand.  Oh well, I got a refill and a coupon for a free beverage.  Nice service.  Thanks Starbucks!

Charlottesville (8/26/2014)

On the road again this week after a long hiatus.  Thank goodness this road trip took me to a great city.  Somehow Charlottesville embodies a lot of what I like in a city: it has atmosphere, a city center and great places to eat.  Classes had just started at UVA (I think this was the first day of classes).

After a day of teaching, most of us involved with the training decided to go unwind on a terrace of a wonderful pizza restaurant.  Sitting there with a micro-brewed beer we talked about the class, work in general, people we had in common and life itself, we started noticing that a person jogged by at least every 30 seconds.  Being all men in our group, the scantly dressed women joggers were the most noticeable, but yes it was approximately every 30 seconds.

Siting there I realized what I missed so much now I live in suburbia.  Charlottesville is very much like the older European cities; but then Thomas Jefferson lived there, and good old Ton was a fan of old Europe, in particular France.  I live in the suburbs.  A major highway divides the area into smaller subsections and all the shopping is concentrated in mini strip malls and grocery stores along the main drag.  Walking and biking along the main drag is dangerous to your health (or should I say life).  There is nothing really going on and if you don't know where you are, you could be in a suburb in any town in the US.  Some readers will tell me that Yorktown has a few interesting restaurants and is a walking/biking community.  It is, but it is small, part is owned by the park service and the development along the water was planned for tourists rather than the locals to meet, great and entertain.  But it is the only thing we have and people hunker for it,  Activities in Yorktown are consistently well attended.  Now we are building town center like developments in Yorktown, but the first thing that went up was another chain restaurant (Subway) rather than a nice funky restaurant with outside seating and a fun place to hang out and go for a drink with your friends.  More in my posting for the next day about this.

I had to take this photo of the public transport in Charlottesville.  It's free.  Yes we have free transportation in Yorktown, from one tourist attraction to the next, but it is not like this.

Richmond (8/25/2014)

Traveling later in the day to Charlottesville, I decided to go have lunch at my favorite restaurant, to find it was closed for the month of August.  So I decided to walk on and go to my second favorite place in the "fan."  I really used to enjoy my lunchtime walks in the "fan", but since we moved offices my daily walks moved further up town. It was nice to be back and somehow I liked what I saw in this picture; a more European feeling downtown.  I have nothing really profound to say about this, other than I like the cobblestones, the old building and the mature trees.  Just a nice composition in my eyes.

Yorktown (8/24/2014)

It was a great weekend for a bike ride.  The weather was unseasonably cool but it was a bit windy.  After we left home we first did what we call the tour road, which is the tour road in the Yorktown Battlefield.  It was a busy day there, lots of runners and bikers.  The sky was absolutely gorgeous, clear blue with nice puffy clouds.  From the tour road we biked on to the coast guard station, where we stopped to look over the York River at the Moore House, a nice colonial house located on a site with considerable history.  The photo below was taken at a small cemetery near the Moore house.  We parked the bikes and went to look over the York River.  The other photo is looking over the York River.  After our stop we continued our bike trip along Wormley Pond, a place I have taken pictures at before (see my post of 4/2/2014).  We biked a total of 18 miles, a nice training ride for our yearly trip to Salisbury, MD to ride the Seagull Century. 

During our ride I still cannot believe all the trash along the road.  It is really amazing the crap people throw away, but on this trip Bud light won the prize.  I want to bet that some teenagers needed to clean their car before they got home.  It is amazing to see what people throw out.  I need to do a week-long series on trash I see during my walks, bike and car trips.  I should title it scenic trash.  Who knows stay tuned.

New Kent (8/21/2014)

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.