Once a Reston resident

A World Defined by Construction

We traveled to Reston recently to conduct some business.  The changes in the area's infrastructure since our last trip in October of 2012 were pretty spectacular.

In October it seemed as if all of Northern Virginia was turned upside down.  This April the pieces seemed to be falling into place.  The Wiehle Silver Line Station looks the part and the new lanes on the beltway are just as confusing to a visitor as I thought they would be.

During those many years I worked in Reston I was convinced that residents operated on the theory that if you did not know exactly what lane you should be in at all times, that you had no business cluttering up the roads.

I was traveling from Southwest Virginia at the time on a regular enough basis that I could keep myself from being run over.  Now that our visits are more like every six months than every week, things are a little more challenging. 

The Toll Authority decided that I was not using my EasyPass enough so we had to send it back and they kept the money that was in the account.  Having to travel with quantities of quarters does not help the situation.

Still I am impressed with how the landscape has changed.  When I first visited the Dulles area in 1987, Route 28 was a congested two lane road.  I often wonder where it will all end.  After all the traffic jams do not seem to be disappearing only moving farther out.

We now live on the North Carolina coast, an area with almost no traffic. We are more used to land being shaped by wind and waves than man.  Here on our coast, buildings are constructed with the hope that they will survive the next storm not the pouding of millions of subway riders. 

We are actually lucky along the Crystal Coast, much of our construction is newer than what hurricane Sandy swept away in New Jersey.  When our house was built, it was constructed to the most current flood maps. We are a few miles back from the beach and are protected by Bogue Banks and its seriously strong vegetation.

Still mother nature manages to push around a lot of sand   Man's efforts at restoring sand that storms move is little more than a shell game.  In spite of that, we love the beach and do not want it to disappear so I applaud efforts to keep the inlets open and the beaches from disappearing. A lot of people benefit here from the beaches.  Also we are better protected because of dunes that are here. I am pleased that area officials value our sand and dunes so much.

I am particularly fond of the area in the town of Emerald Isle called the Point.  It is a very dynamic piece of sand.  In November of 2007 as this picture shows it was covered with water.  Today if you stand in the ocean where the sand ends and look back at where the 2007 photo was taken you will find over 1,400 feet of sand as you can see from this photo taken in April of 2013.

That is a lot of sand that mother nature has moved.  It certainly makes you appreciate the power of wind and waves and puts a little damper on any thoughts that we might have this world under control.

If you would like to read more about my most recent adventure on the Point, try this post, The End of the Sand. If all your beach memories have high rise condos in them, the Emerald Isle area is well worth visiting because that is not what beaches are really like.  Everyone needs to appreciate a strand of sand where there is almost nothing and we have places like that in Carteret County.

Emerald Isle is a place that you can have a beach vacation reminiscent of ones that we North Carolinians enjoyed so much in the fifties and sixties. Our area is not a Myrtle Beach and does not want to be Duck. We are pretty happy with our image of a family beach where everyone is welcome to enjoy the beach.

We have just published A Week at the Beach -The 2013 Travel Guide to Emerald Isle. On May 1 & 2 it is a free download.  It is a Kindle book but there is free software available to let you read it on almost anything.  Check out this webpage for details.

If you love beautiful uncrowded beaches, you will enjoy the book, its many pictures and maps and even recipes.  It is a beach lover's guide to loving a very special beach area.

Wishing for a Beach Evening in the City

'There were a lot of nights when I worked in the DC area that I wished for one of those nights when you get out of the car and you feel like you're at the beach.

Once in a while I have walked across the parking at the Kroger at Ridgewood Farms in Roanoke, VA and it briefly felt like a beach night.  I never got that feeling in Reston. Summer in the city is different. Maybe there are  too many roads or the buildings absorb too much heat.

The feeling of an evening at the beach is a curious mix of warmth, moisture, and breeze.  It is a little like the warmth encircles your body without really heating you up.  Just as you feel the heat getting ready to make the jump to your body, the breeze comes along and pushes away just enough of the heat to keep you comfortable.

Here on the Crystal Coast, it is not surprising that we often have evenings that feel like we are the beach.  The beach in fact is our neighbor and only a few miles away.  A strong sea breeze and the humidity of summer are almost always present.  We just need a day when the heat doesn't linger past six or seven PM.

Then if you are anywhere within a few miles of the beach, it still feels like you are at the beach.  That embracing warmth is a feeling that makes those of us who live here feel at home.

Heat in the city and at the beach are two different animals.  I've been really hot in the city a few times usually when I was wearing a suit and hiking to the Pentagon on an account call.

While in the city, the pavement and buildings absorb the heat, here on the coast, the water absorbs more heat that almost anything except people working outside.

Those days that I have been hot in the city, the cure is pretty simple, get into an air conditioned space and take off as many clothes as possible.  In the city it is almost like the heat is trapped in your clothing and not your body.

It's different here on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina. When you work outside, you start with as few clothes as possible except you add a straw hat.  If you work hard outside for a few hours even during the early morning hours, the heat will penetrate your whole body.  You can take your clothes off when you come inside, but unlike in the city, the heat is still in your body.  It is a lot like having a good workout in a very hot place.

When you come inside hot from mowing the yard, the only way to cool down is to get in the shower and turn on only the cold water.  With our waterlines not buried very deep, our summer water is never very cold, but it is the perfect temperature to cool an overheated person.

After cooling and readjusting to the inside world of little humidity, it is easy to go back into the heat as along as you don't stay for extended periods in the middle of the day. A trip outside when it is ninety degrees isn't much of a shock to system mainly because most of us on the coast don't cool our homes below 78F.If you keep your coastal home at 72F, each time you walk inside, it will feel like you have walked into a meat locker. 

There are days and nights that it never cools and never feels like you are at the beach.  You just feel like you are stuck in a sauna.  Fortunately for us those nights are rare and often confined to August with maybe a few nights in late July where the heat also never dissipates.

July 9, 2012 was a warm day across the east coast, but not as warm as the day before.  I expect as the sun gets behind the Longleaf pine trees and the bite of the heat of the day disappears, it is likely that the night like so many others will feel like a night at the beach.

While the warm feeling of being at the beach isn't as welcome in the summer as it is the cooler fall air, still it is a comfortable feeling that would have helped me get through all those nights in the city.

If you haven't had your escape from Northern Virginia and DC yet this year, give the Crystal Coast some thought.  We are about six hours from Reston.  Once you get here, you will find one of the greatest remaining family beaches in North Carolina.

Development hasn't been as dense as it has in many places.  Also we still have much of our natural vegetation.  In many areas you get to experience a Maritime forest.  You will also find some of the nicest and most accessible beaches on the east coast.

Our area is not an area of wall to wall high-rises and dozens of golf courses interspersed with outlet malls like Myrtle Beach.  It is a magical place protected on one side by Cape Lookout National Seashore and on the other side by the 158,000 acres of the Croatan National Forest.  The Marines at Camp Lejeune and the Atlantic ocean take care of the other two sides.

There are many special places like the Point at Emerald Isle out beyond the yellow house or the beaches of Hammocks Beach State Park that you reach by state owned pontoon boat. The Crystal Coast is a place where the residents seem to live without walls. Learning to live with the heat is just part of living in the South.  Enjoying the nights when the whole area feels like an evening at the beach is part of life on the coast.

My 87 page travel guide for Emerald Isle has all the information you need for a truly memorable holiday.  It is currently available for $4.99 in Kindle format with an iPad version in the works.  It can be read on any device by using the free kindle reader software on other devices.

If you give the Crystal Coast a chance, you might be really surprised at what a neat place it is.

Reston, the epicenter of shopping

A little over a week ago, we were listening to the NBC national news while eating our dinner at our home along North Carolina's Crystal Coast.  My wife and I both got up out of our chairs when we heard Brian Williams do the lead-in for a story about shopping from Reston Town Center.

By the time we got to the television, the cameras were rolling in front of the skating rink in Reston. It was pretty neat to see a place that has figured so prominently in our family's lives over the years on national television.

I still remember visiting Reston for the first time in 1987 when people still thought Dulles Airport would never make it.  I wonder if any of those who doubted the success of the airport are still around to see all the construction of the new rail line.

Later in 1992, I moved the base of operations for my Apple higher education team to Apple's Reston, Va office which was on Preston White Drive for many years before moving over to Town Center.  There were numerous times that I stayed at the Hyatt in Town Center. I cannot even count the number of meetings and dinners that I survived in and around Town Center.  I can even remember being snowed in there one Friday in a December long ago.

I decided to stay in Reston that night rather than risk the long drive back down Interstate 81 to Roanoke, Va.  I was excited until I figured out that all the shops and services in Town Center had closed because of the snow.  I made my way out of town early the next morning.

It was not unusual during my many years of working out of the Reston area for my wife to accompany me for at least one trip during the Christmas season. She enjoyed being overwhelmed by the Reston and Northern Virginia shopping experience.

My oldest daughter and her college roommate from Sweet Briar stayed at the town center Hyatt using some of my travel points after they graduated and embarked on their first job hunting experience.

Of course over the years I have done a fair amount of shopping at Town Center.  In a certain metaphorical way, it is the center of North Virginia shopping located between Tyson's Corner and all the more western based shopping.  It was certainly an appropriate spot for the national news to talk about Christmas shopping.

It is funny that even by 2006 which was the last year I worked in Northern Virginia, I had stopped doing my Reston Town Center shopping trips.  Though I was staying not far off of Wiehle, it was still quicker and easier to head over to Tyson's Corner if you knew exactly where you were headed.  Tyson's Corner also generally had more convenient parking, not to mention LL Bean's, Levenger, and the Apple Store.

Still if you are interesting in shopping, the Reston area has just about everything that one could imagine. There is still no LL Bean's, but I used to joke that if you couldn't find it near Reston, it probably wasn't being built anywhere.  We still enjoy visiting our grown children who live in the area.  We still hit some of our favorite spots like Trader Joe's and LL Bean.

The five years since I last worked in Reston have taken us to the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina. It is much more peaceful on the coast of North Carolina than it is in Northern Virginia. As I am fond of mentioning, our parking spots are designed for extended cab trucks pulling a boat not a Toyota Prius with a bike rack.

The twenty minute trip to the shopping area in Morehead City is nothing like a run to Tyson's Corner.  While we find Belks, Walmart, TJ Maxx, and most of the smaller national stores, we still haven't gotten a Target.

Most of the truly local shopping has to come from Ace Hardware, Lowe's Home Improvement, Walgreen's. or some of the cute local shops in Swansboro.  It is a totally different shopping experience especially during the holiday season.  I am a little more geared to the laid back shopping experience now than I am to fighting for a parking space by Best Buy in Reston.  While we have a Best Buy in Morehead City, it is a baby one compared to the Reston one.

Every place has its good point, and shopping is one of Reston's which is why I guess it was featured on the national news.  Peace and quiet what you find at the beach in December.  The beach in the winter is about as far from the commercialism of the season as you can get.  Instead of extended hours, it is not unusual to find shortened hours. 

The different environment helps you to focus on what is important which happens to be the people in your life.  It also allows for the season to bring back some memories of Christmas trees from the past which is my favorite part of this time of year.

If the cold weather holds for December 26, we are hoping to make some peanut brittle which is a tradition that my mother kept up for most of our life.  Somehow doing peanut brittle seems a little more natural overlooking the mountains than within ear shot of the Toll Road.  Still I am sure there must be some great Reston Christmas traditions, maybe even some very good peanut brittle.  We are a lot closer to fresh peanuts.

The warm early winter that has made the east coast so comfortable has made for a very nice December at the beach. In fact the whole fall has been very pleasant.

There have been some stellar days over on the beach with shorts weather being very common.  It has been a season of where the signs of the changing season have yet to pan out.  Sometime the weather has been so good that I have been afraid that it would just disappear or that it was actually a dream.

Still I love to come visit Reston just because being there puts you in the middle of everything. By the same token, I also enjoy being on the side of a mountain high above the city or down on the coast where the nearest mall is 18 miles away.  Actually I really prefer having fish in my backyard to having a Target or a Walmart.

It is interesting that some of what made Reston unique has migrated to other spots.  We recently found a Trader Joe's just off Highway 64 in Cary, North Carolina. We even heard Wilmington, NC about an hour and a half from us is getting a Trader Joe's.  However, I think it is going to be a while before Reston is replaced as the epicenter of shopping.

Summer in the city

Summer in the city obviously looks nothing like this beach picture.  If it did, we would all be flocking to the city.

There are a couple of things that I remember as being nice during a summer in Reston.  One was that traffic thinned enough to be noticed.

The other was city life itself seemed to back off from its normal intensity just a little.  Of course the morning rush hour was still there on Wiehle, and there was still plenty of traffic for most people's tastes.

It is hard not to say that there are better places to be than the Washington Metro area in summer. The truth is that almost no one wants to be in the city during the summer.  To measure the truth of the statement, just get on one of the main roads out of town on a Friday before a weekend.

I used to try to leave my Reston office on Thursdays during the summer just to stay off Interstates 66 & 81 on Fridays.  I doubt it has gotten any better in the five years since I stopped working in Reston.  I know that during our spring visit, I was impressed with the amount of road upheaval.  To an outsider it might look like the guts are being changed in the area's infrastructure.  However, they didn't live through the mixing bowl construction.

My theory on summer in the city is simple.  Streets, buildings, and concrete all absorb heat and then radiate it at night.  In spite of Reston having more trees than many urban areas, it is impossible to escape the heat.  Of course all the trees help stop any thought of cooling breezes.

Having the buildings act as a giant heat sink could be useful in winter, but unfortunately I don't think it works that way. All the concrete seems to absorb cold and intensify the cold during the winter.

So it is that everyone looks forward to getting out of the city in the summer.  People just want to get away from the heat, roads, people, and traffic.  Ideally you want to find a lake, beach or some body of water, and Reston's manmade lakes really don't count.

Virginia doesn't have a lot of lakes so there is no quick escape like Lake Norman provides for Charlotte.  Of course there is the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River, but somehow a real escape seems to demand a little more travel and a little less traffic.

Crossing over to Maryland's Eastern Shore and perhaps heading to Rehoboth Beach or one of the other Delaware beaches is an option that can be done in under 3.5 hours if there is no traffic according to Google maps.  Taking the trip to four hours can get you to Virginia Beach, but it is almost as urban as Reston.

About four hours will get you to Smith Mountain Lake near Roanoke. Four hours will also get you to Kerr/Buggs Island Lake which is the middle of lot of Virginia countryside.   All those venues have their advocates, and they certainly have the advantage of relatively short driving times.

A couple of more hours, give or take a few minutes, will get you to some serious North Carolina beaches.  Most people from the Reston area are familiar with Corolla, Duck, Kitty Hawk, and Nags Head. Add another hour and you can be on Hatteras Island waiting in line for the ferry to Ocracoke.

Depending on the traffic gods, you can probably get to North Carolina's lesser known Crystal Coast in about six hours.  My wife and I have made it from the Wiehle entrance on the toll road to the stoplight by the Emerald Isle bridge in six hours at least a couple of times even with the inevitable traffic in Fredericksburg.

I won't pretend to know about Rehoboth Beach or any of the other Delaware beaches, but I do know the North Carolina beaches very well.  I grew up going to them, and never stopped visiting until I managed to find a spot near the beach where I could live.

The area south of Ocracoke Island is sometimes called the Southern Outer Banks.  Cape Lookout National Seashore is part of the area and is only accessible by boat.  There are 56 miles or so of wild isolated beaches there.

The real attraction of the Southern Outer Banks is the Crystal Coast which stretches from Beaufort, NC to Swansboro, NC.  The heart of the area is a strand of beach which runs from Fort Macon State Park near Atlantic to the Point of Emerald Isle. 

The area has about twenty one miles of beautiful beach with a population density of about half of what you would find in one of the Delaware beaches. The area is even on the doorstep of the 158,000 acres of the Croatan National Forest.  The National Forest and the National Seashore keep the area from becoming just another over-developed beach area.

There are a wide variety of accomodations available on the shore, but the majority of what you will find are single family homes available for weekly rentals.  There is one small oceanfront motel in Emerald Isle and a couple of larger ones up by Atlantic Beach.  There are some scattered condo complexes, but nothing like the wall to wall highrises in Myrtle Beach.

The area differs greatly from Myrtle Beach.  The main activities on the Crystal Coast are walking on the beach, fishing, boating, or visiting some of the area's historical sites. It is a peaceful area where stress is not part of the daily equation.

The Crystal Coast gets its name from the crystal clear waters that are usually found on its shores.  I have visited beaches from Assateague Island all the way to Myrtle Beach, and I think some of the best beaches on the east coast are within the town limits of Emerald Isle.  I have walked all the miles of beach within Emerald Isle's corporate boundaries at least three times since spring, and I am always amazed at the beauty of the beaches, and how there always seems to be space to enjoy the beach.

One of the unique things about the area is that the beaches face the south.  Having the ocean to the south instead of the east is a little different, but it has its advantages especially during the cooler months.

If summer in Reston has finally gotten to you, or if the 104F or 106F high temperatures in the forecast towards the end of the third week of July 2011 have you considering a quick exit from town, you can check out our forecast temperatures for Emerald Isle.

The water has been warm enough for dipping in since the end of May so it is nearly perfect now.  You can check water temperatures for much of the east coast at this link.  You will find our surf temperatures in the mid-eighties which is just enough to cool you off and to keep those super hot temperatures at bay.

Our area also has the advantage of being a great area for boating whether you choose the sound or one of the big coastal rivers.  Our traffic even on July 4th doesn't really compare to what anyone from Reston sees on a weekly basis so you can drop that worry because we are already past the season's peak traffic.

If you are planning on visiting, you can read lots more about the area at my Emerald Isle Travel Guide.

It is a unique area which has a real year round population.  So while you get the advantage of being at the beach, you don't have to give up any modern services. 

If you are a regular to Northern Outer Banks, you will be surprised at how much vegetation surrounds the homes in our beach communities and how laid back life is here on the Crystal Coast.

You might just the discover why the almost secret beaches that native North Carolinians have been enjoying for years are such a great place to live and visit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A holiday shopping trip to the big city

Northern Virginia is a wonderful place to shop.  I doubt  there are many places where you can find so much shopping so conveniently located.  During my career at Apple Computer when I worked out of Reston, I would always try to bring my wife up for a holiday shopping trip.

Some of the trips stick in my mind.  One particularly nice visit around 2000 was when our corporate hotel was the Ritz-Carlton in Tyson's II.  We had a beautiful room, and we even got some snow and ice to strand us in the Ritz for 24 hours.  I think we managed a dinner at Maggiano's and breakfast at one of the food court shops.

Fortunately the weather cleared so my wife could visit Tyson's I which is her favorite mall.  There was a time when we would do a lot of holiday shopping, but now that our children are in their twenties and thirties, we only buy stocking presents.

With that in mind and some potential personal shopping for us, we made a visit to Reston just before Halloween this year.  It was actually a great time to hit the stores.  Our son took a day off from work and escorted us to Tyson's I.  As always we were amazed at the variety of stores, and at how many people wander the malls.

Our first stop as always was LL Bean's.   I made a quick trip to the men's department, found a pair of jeans, and then visited the sale racks where I found a couple of items.  My wife was still checking out the ladies clothes with our son when I took off to visit the Apple Store.  I wanted a copy of the newly released Microsoft Office for the Mac, and a firewire adapter cable.  After getting those items, I managed to have some hands on time with the new MacBook Air systems.

While I love Apple hardware, even I find it hard to justify their pricing.  I did finally buy my first new Mac in four years this fall.  It was an I5 iMac, and it is a great machine, but I do have a few bones to pick with Apple over the design.

After my wife finally decided that there were no clothes in LL Bean's that she needed, I got her to swing by the Apple Store for a quick look at the iPad.  It took her about one minute to decide that she would rather keep her laptop.  She did tell me that if we won the lottery, I could buy her a new MacBook Air.

Our next stop was the Vera Bradley Store.  I was pleased that they have a nice sofa for husbands.  It is great to have a place to relax while all the patterns are examined and debated.  The three ladies in our family are all multiple bag carrying Vera women.  When they all end up traveling together it looks like a Vera Bradley convention.

The staff at the Vera Bradley Store even gave bottles of water to my son and me to keep us hydrated during our shopping experience.  We managed to get out of the store without any purchases and wandered on through the mall.

I was surprised to see a Lego Store and a Steinway Store.  We had lunch at Coastal Flats.  I was amazed to find out that no cell phone worked there. According to my son, who is enough of a regular there to be welcomed by the staff,  I guess it has something to do with the movie theater being above the restaurant.  I am always suspicious in Northern Virginia when my cell phone doesn't work.  I end up looking for unlabeled buildings that might be jamming my signal

It was a great lunch, and a nice follow-up to our dinner the night before at their sister restaurant, Sweetwater Taver.  As we left the mall we visited a couple of children's stores to look for bargains for our granddaughter, and I made a stop at Levenger's just to look at all the neat things that I don't really need.

My wife made it through Tyson's I without buying anything.  I was not surprised. She is a frugal shopper, and she will only buy something when she has found a deal.

She convinced me to drive by our old apartment (now condominium) just north of Tyson's on Chain Bridge Road. I shared the apartment in McLean for a couple of years with my daughter and son just after they got out of college and started working.  Of course the road in the area has doubled or tripled in size.  It must be ten lanes wide at least.  As we passed our old home away from home, we noticed that the southbound lanes of Chain Bridge (Va. 123 or Dolly Madison) were completely stopped.  We had planned on turning around and heading south, but we ended up taking Lewinsville Road back to Spring Hill Road so we could get on the Toll Road without sitting in Friday afternoon, grid-locked traffic.

Of course you rarely avoid even stop and go traffic in Northern Virginia.  On the Toll Road back to Reston we had to exit at Hunter Mill Road to avoid stop and go rubber necking at an accident site.  I guess all the construction for the transit system will make holiday shopping lots of fun.

When we got back to the townhouse, I got to go shopping in my son's closet.  Both he and I have lost substantial weight so I was given a number of his outside jackets, a couple pair of jeans, and several short sleeved shirts.  He buys great stuff, and it is sort of neat to be able to recycle stuff within the family.  If we both keep losing weight, perhaps we can do it again next year.

That evening my wife treated the kids to a home cooked meal which we rustled up from ingredients purchased at the local Whole Foods.   While I wouldn't make Whole Foods my only grocery store, it is certainly a treat once in a while.  Where else could you find an ostrich egg when you need it?

Our entertainment to close the day was watching the Blueray version of Ironman 2 on my son's giant Sony TV.  Saturday morning, our last day in town, we visited for a while, I used my portable, traveling electric blower to clean the leaves off the deck, and then  we headed out for lunch at Chicken Out which used to be one of my evening favorites.

During our trip, we managed to hit most of our favorite spots, but we did not get to drive through Town Center or visit Trader Joe's.  I was diappointed that the Reston Ritz Camera shop has closed, but I am sure that something will spring up to take it's place.

The Northern Virginia area continues to be a neat spot to visit and to live if the traffic doesn't get to you.  We left Reston in early afternoon.  In spite of being in stop and go traffic just north of Fredericksburg for twenty minutes on a Saturday afternoon no less, we were at the stoplight just north of the Emerald Isle Bridge only six hours later. It was a reasonable drive considering all things.

While we are headed into a cold spell of weather down here on the coast, I am glad that I will be missing holiday traffic during construction and winter weather on the Toll Road.  The Southern Outer Banks feels like home these days, even when we get visited with some cold Canadian air.  Things are pretty quiet this time of year along the beach, and it is always a pleasure to get back to pick-up-truck-sized parking spaces instead of the tiny Northern Virginia ones.

I will use the current cold weather as time to work on my HouseVision project and my real estate websites.  We have had a busy fall in real estate, but after four years we are due some activity.  Still I will look forward to my next trip to Northern Virgina, the shopping mecca of the US.

Spring will be here soon in the South, and when Northern Virginia thaws out in April, it might be time for another visit.

 

A different kind of rain

I can remember many rainy days in Reston.  My grown children have told me that Reston has had plenty of rain in the last few days.  I know our home in the mountains of Virginia got rain and now it is having a hard time stopping.

Here on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks, we have actually been very dry. There was little or no rain in the month of May until we got about one third inch on May 17.  Since then we have only seen sprinkles until last night when we finally got about one half inch of rain.

We needed the rain, but it occurred to me that there was something fundamentally different about our rain here on the coast and Northern Virginia rain.

Just like a television commercial I am willing to walk in the rain in my bare feet.  I rarely wear shoes or even sandals when I go get the morning newspaper this time of year.  I actually like the feel of the cool concrete on my feet.

The wet concrete with a light rain on it feels even better.  Perhaps it takes me back to those childhood days in the Piedmont of North Carolina when as kids we never wore shoes.  I can still remember the challenge of walking on our gravel driveway with no shoes.

Even today when I put on shoes, they likely would get me laughed out of a city.

Then again maybe walking down the driveway reminds me of walking along the wet sand on the beaches.  Perhaps it is the closest thing that I can get early in the morning to a great day on the beach.

Whatever it is, I would not walk to the mailbox in Reston in bare feet.  It is just not something you do in a city.  The rain does not run nearly as clear in any city as it does here at the beach.  Maybe our skies that stay almost perpetually brilliant Carolina blue have something to do with that.

Of course life is a lot more casual at the beach. There are very few suits, and most of our umbrellas are beach ones.   It is not that unusual to see people standing outside in a light shower talking.

Perhaps we are deluding ourselves, but it is a very pleasant delusion.

Seeking refuge from shopping fever

I am remember well many of the falls that I covered my Reston years.  The city seems to snap back from summer like summer never even happened.  The buzz of traffic goes back to its normal level.

As the temperatures start dropping, holiday fever creeps into everyone's thoughts.  Shopping while plentiful in Northern Virginia can be stressful.  Just finding the time, a parking space, and someone to wait on you can be a huge challenge.  I often found myself sneaking off to LL Bean to do a little early shopping just so I would not get caught in the crowds.

Once you get into the shopping mode, it is hard to unwind or stop.  It is not like you can really escape places to shop in Northern Virginia.  At one time, your home could be a place safe from shopping, but now with Internet and catalog shopping, even the home has become a place of shopping.  And if you happen to turn your television on, you will be reminded of that more than once.

In a rural area like North Carolina's Crystal Coast, escaping shopping is not the problem, finding a place to shop is the challenge  If we want a serious department store, we have to drive eighteen miles.  Now before you jump the gun and apply Northern Virginia standards to the trip, the eighteen miles takes less than eighteen minutes.  Still the trip is not something you make in the evening unless you are serious about buying something.

So here we are on the coast in place with much less of an opportunity to shop.  On top of that our weather most fall is very nice.  This fall it is exceptional.  We have seen great weather even this first week of November. I have a theory that says, the better the outside weather, the less people are interested in shopping.  That is especially true if they live in an area where playing in the outdoors is easy and rewarding.

Our area which is near the beaches of Emerald Isle happens to fit that description perfectly.  So the question is, "Why would you want to shopping when you could go boating or fishing." The simple answer is that you would not.

Perhaps that is why no one here on the coast seems to be thinking about the holidays.  The weather is far too good to be fooling around with shopping.  This is still shorts weather. It is so nice outside we have been cleaning and washing down the house in preparation for cooler weather.  I still have green tomatoes growing on my tomato plants.  Our roses are still blooming.  The fish are still biting, and I have not been in a department store in months.

This afternoon as the day was winding down, we climbed in our boat and lowered it in the water for a quiet journey out into the river to watch the sun slip behind the horizon.  Had I been in Reston, I might have made a run to Tyson's to visit Bean's.  It would have just been another trip to a mall that I would forget as soon as it happened.

Tonight's sunset will not be forgotten so easily.  It is a memory that my wife and I will enjoy together. We could only hear a few birds out on the river.  It was a wonderful way to end a day.  It was certainly the right spot to escape any shopping fever that might try to infect us from up north.

Dreaming of a home

Being in the real estate business I deal a lot with people's dreams.  Having lived and worked in the Reston area, I know well the challenges of finding affordable housing.

Reston is a great place with lots of jobs and plenty of shopping, and  it is conveniently located to just about everything except reasonable priced housing.

Every area has its threshold of housing prices.  In some places you have to be an executive to afford a home, in others teachers can buy homes.  It all depends on the area, the density of housing, the cost of land, the price of labor and a number of other factors.

We have all been through a roller coaster ride on housing prices.  When my daughter bought her townhouse in Reston, she had to race other buyers to the good properties.  Today things have changed, but housing is still pretty expensive in Reston.

Here on the coast, you can buy a new three bedroom, two bath home with 1,600 square feet for under $170,000 and still be less than fifteen minutes from the beach.  If you can deal with a smaller home built a few years ago, you can get a home for $160,000 or under.  A new home like the one pictured in the post in a gated community like Bluewater Cove where I live will cost you something over $300,000 but less than $400,000 unless you want to be on the water.

All those prices look pretty cheap compared to what it costs to buy a single family home in Reston.  The big difference is jobs. Jobs are scarce on the coast of North Carolina, but the cost of living including property taxes is also very attractive to most people including retirees. 

We end up with lots of small business owners, people who cannot live without the ocean, and some people who enjoy our warm climate no matter what their age.

Every time I write about the Crystal Coast on the blog Crystal Coast Living, I think about how different our area is from places like Reston.  We might have half a dozen traffic jams a year lasting a few minutes when everyone tries to check into their rental properties at the same time on the fourth of July weekend and a few other popular weekends.

Other than that there are lots of differences besides housing prices. It should not come as a surprise that we have lots of space since we have a 158,000 acre National Forest on one side and miles and miles of an undeveloped National Seashore on the other side.

Because of all the space and fewer people, it gets dark here at night. There is no glow, and you can see the stars in the  skies.  We also still have old fashioned events like a covered dinner supper at church. It is not a stretch to think that by November all the new waitresses who came in during the summer will know you.  The old ones never forgot you.

As I remember those days creeping along the toll road to Tyson's early in the morning, I wonder why you cannot have the jobs of a Reston in a place where people can afford to live.  I still remember my area associate when I was director of federal sales for Apple.  She had to drive an hour and forty five minutes morning and night in order to get to an area where she could afford a home.  She would have been very well paid by standards down here.

It is a stretch to think that lots of Reston style jobs will ever make it to the North Carolina coast.  However, the loss falls more on the companies who fail to understand how much more productive people can be when they do not spend half their lives commuting.

Those of us who manage to scrape by down here have a lot of fun, and the air we breath is first rate.  The sky is blue and the clouds are white. When our feet need some work, we just go for a walk on the beach.

Having fun is as simple as dropping your boat in the water and heading out to the Inlet.  In the case of going to the Inlet, the journey is definitely the reward.

It is a good life even without fancy jobs. I can even handle the mowing job for my yard without too many complaints.

A better kind of Sunday traffic

I remember when I first started visiting Reston years ago. In the late eighties people thought Reston was never going to make it.  

Then in mid-nineties I can remember talking to people who thought Reston was going to become so crowded that it would be impossible to go to a grocery store on the weekend.

I think it is safe to say that Reston will muddle on with its traffic.

My son hates to shop for groceries during day in.  Reston because of the traffic and small parking places.

Recently I have been thinking that it would neat to have a grocery store on the water.  I guess my dream store would have plenty of places to tie up a skiff.  You could hop off the boat and do your shopping.  Then it would take just a few minutes to get home.

The boats in the pictues are in the Intracoaslal Waterway.  I bet most Reston people would trade our water traffic for their car traffic.

Unfortunately I doubt that Lake Anna in Reston would make enough connection to replace the roads.  The farmers market seems to work well, but there is just not enough water in Reston for my waterside grocery to work.

These perfect beach days are behind all my dreams.  Once we get to January, I will be back to reality.

Where bridges still rule the road

With a world defined by huge multiple lane highways, anyone from Reston who ventures down to Beaufort, NC must think they have dropped off the face of the earth.  After all the main roads narrow to two lanes.

Then there is the famous Galllant's Channel drawbridge which seems to open at the most inconvenient times.  Yesterday we were headed to Beaufort from Cape Carteret with the hope of seeing the replica ships, the Nina and Pinta.

We were on a tight schedule since I had to work at 1 PM in the Bluewater Real Estate office.  Just as we were approaching Beaufort, the traffic ground to a halt as the drawbridge opened.

Since I have been here on the beach for nearly three years, I no longer get very upset about delays.  I have lost the tan line on my watch arm. That happened when I stopped wearing a watch.  However, I was wondering how the Maryland and Virginia cars who zoomed past me on the short causeway were handling the delay.

I know from experience that North Virginia people do not like to stop even for red lights.  They can also get a little aggressive around parking spots at their favorite shopping and eating spots.

Imaging the morning Toll Road grinding to a halt because of a drawbridge would send chills down the back of anyone who has tried to make a meeting  before nine AM meeting in Tyson's Corner.

I am not sure why boats have the right of way over traffic, but I guess it adds charm to Beaufort and give visitors something to talk about.

It is a short wait and much more enjoyable than a two hours waiting in traffic as they clean up an accident on the two lane traffic.

To create memories that you want to keep and will help you forget drawbridges, read this, What Makes a Vacation Memorable?