Once a Reston resident

Truly a missing element

The Reston area is a spot where almost all human desires can be fulfilled.  I can't think of a product or a service that is unavailable to the area. 

Except perhaps you have to go to Tyson's Corner for the Apple Store.  Who knows maybe the rumored move of Apple's local office to Town Center might bring an Apple Store to Reston.

Someone should probably ask Steve about that.

Whenever I visited Reston, I would first miss my mountain sunrises and then the water.  Even in Roanoke, the Roanoke River winds through the city.

Where I soak my feet these days, water is everywhere.  I see it from the window of my home office. It is my stress reducer. It often makes our day either a great one or one that we would rather skip.

I drive over a huge bridge over Bogue Sound just to go get my car filled up.  Somehow as nice as Reston's manufactured lakes are, they just don't have the life that the surf or sound does or even a mountain river like the Roanoke.

The ever changing water along the coast is something that is so intertwined with our lives that it becomes the defining element of the way we live.

If it is sunny and warm with little wind, we may go over to the beach for a walk.

If it is windy, driving over the bridge to Emerald Isle might be as close as we get to the water that day.

If it is really nice outside, people start figuring out how to skip out and get on their boat.

If the weather is terrible with a storm coming, we might even head to the hills.

Maybe the toll road is to Reston what the water is to the coast.

An empty toll road invites a trip.

A clogged toll road creates a panic.

In a certain sense I guess the toll road is the main artery for Reston's heart.

I think I would rather be tied to the water.

Not a scene from Reston

One of the things I miss every time I come to Reston is a beautiful sunrise.  Where I stay backs up on some parkland with big trees and of course Reston does not have a lot of mountainsides.

Still I have seen some pretty nice sunsets in Reston.  I just never can find a safe place to take a picture ofthem.

Where we live on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, we never have sunsets.  The sun disappears behind the trees before it sets.

To catch a sunset we have to go lower into the valley.  Of course a location like where I have taken this pictures leads to lots of great sunrises.

At our new second home, we have a lot of mobility to get to where you can take either a great sunrise or a fantastic sunset.  I have collections of photos on both Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.  We have so little traffic at the coast that I can often stop in the middle of a bridge for great shot.  Somehow I don't think that would ever work in Reston.

Once in a while I take some pictures that aren't very flattering like the one in this post when my son and I were hauling brush from Reston to the dump.

This is a great first day of summer, I am actually going to disconnect from the Internet and take my own advice that I gave readers earlier this morning in my Applepeels post.

Land of the suits

It was a running joke among my Reston employees that I kept track of the number of times that I had to wear a suit on an appointment and that it would cost you when performance review time rolled around.

Actually I never could figure out how to penalize anyone for making me wear a suit in July and walk from Pentagon City Mall through the tunnel to the Pentagon. 

But anyone who has done it knows just how hot that can be and that people who schedule appointments there in July do need punishment.

Today I took the day off down here on the coast.  I cut some brush and grasses in the morning.  Then three of us in our neighborhood, Bluewater Cove, near Cape Carteret, NC cleaned the furniture that goes around our community pool.  It wasn't very tough duty.  We were done in thirty minutes, and then spent the next couple of hours sitting around talking.

Had we known how long we were going to sit there, I know we would have retrieved some beer to quench our thirst.  Once we sat down, it so pleasant that none of us could move.

We have a fair number of escapees from high pressure areas like Reston so we love to sit around and trade war stories.  We also have lots of northerners who have seen the light and moved to where snow is only a fond memory.

Today I was telling them about a company who called me to interview as their VP of Federal Sales.  The recruiter told me the salary which was very attractive, and then I said I was not interested.

I told the lady that putting on a suit and fighting beltway traffic wasn't what I wanted to do for the next five years even if it meant I have to work some for the next twenty years.

I have noticed most people here work at least part time which considering the sixteen hours that I sometimes worked at Apple seems like a vacation.

The people in Reston are some of the most intense hardworking people around.  It does take a toll eventually, and there were times when I worked in the high tech world that it was the second week of my vacation before I remembered how to be on vacation.

Now I hear people don't even take two weeks much less three.  I wonder if a town can burn out?

After we adjourned our poolside meeting, I went kayaking for a while in the White Oak River.  I was surprised that the water in the river seemed to be warmer than the water in the pool.  That will change soon as we're expecting stellar warm weather for the next few days.

Once I got cleaned up from my river trip we headed over to the beach at Emerald Isle.  It was quite a bit cooler on the beach, but I waded out enough to get my shorts pretty wet while I was taking pictures.

The beach was empty except for my wife and myself.  After the beach visit we headed down to the Crab Shack in Salter Path for some seafood.  I had to settle for snow crab legs instead of blue crabs since my wife wanted to watch the finals of American Idol.

The staff there was looking forward to the holiday crowds.  I am just dreading the suit I have to wear to a wedding in Harrisonburg this weekend.  Well I guess I have to use it once in a while to make sure it still fits.

Watching the sunrise

One of the things that I used to miss the most on my trips to Reston was watching the sunrise in the Roanoke Valley.  This morning I was energetic enough to be able to catch one.

I say that, because the sun comes up at a little after six in the morning, and these days I would rather be in a warm bed than shivering some place waiting for the sun to creep over the horizon.

I can remember several mornings when an early morning commute on the Toll Road was disrupted by particularly bright sunshine.  I cannot remember which months the orientation of the sun caused the most problems.

When you are on a mountainside or walking along the beaches, a serious commute is about the most remote thing from your mind.

I remained amazed at the dedication of most commuters.  My former administrative assistant in Reston still commutes over an hour and one half each way each day.  I know it wears her out, but I also know that she isn't alone.

Just maybe the metro out to the airport will help a little.

I had hoped to get this blog going with a flurry of posts,but I have been doing some all consuming web work that has slowed me down.

I have completely revamped my CoastalNC.org site and my Coastal Real Estate site.  I hope that I have created a better user experience and made the information easier to find.

You can see some of the results of my work in the clickable buttons to my sites that are now in this blog's side panel.

I would love to hear any feedback. You can click here to email comments to me.

I have also started a real estate newsletter about coastal property which I will t try to do once a quarter,  The first one is available for viewing and  if you would like to subscribe,  this link will get you to the form.

I have also chosen the Reston Backfence Online community for my first online ad.  I will be interested to see what the response is.

As far away as you can get

It has been about sixteen months since I did the Reston dance.  The Reston dance to me was the ride down Wiehle Avenue and onto to the toll road for a ride to Tyson's Corner during rush hour.  It was usually hurry up to make the Toll Road only to hope you didn't just sit there.

Being someone with roots far from Town Center, it was probably more stressful for me than most Reston residents.  It was strange to watch the traffic ebb and flow, but that in a nutshell is Northern Virginia, an area where it sometimes takes forever even to go short distances.

It is also an area where a field of flowers around a major intersection like the picture to the left is just impossible.  Space is at a premium in Reston.  The parking places are small even when you manage to find one.  The parking space here on the Southern Outer Banks are big enough for pick-up trucks while the Reston spaces seem to have  gotten far smaller over time.

My first meeting in Reston was in 1987.  I was in my third year of working for Apple Computer,  and we had just moved to Columbia, Maryland which I heard was the model for Reston.  Apple was one of the early companies to locate in Reston, and I was visiting their federal office. Reston was not the center of the universe in 1987 or anything close to being Silicon Valley east.

It was the beginning of the end when I came to Reston in 1993 as a manager. Apple's federal group was in it's death throes but didn't know it.  At the time, I was a higher education district manager, and the federal folks thought so little of us that I had to share a cube with my area associate.

When I left Apple in 2004, I was Apple's director of federal sales and the top dog in Apple's Reston office. All those federal folks who had neglected to welcome my team were long gone.  I had managed to revive Apple federal business, but in reality it was far too late to really matter.  The federal government was solidly Windows well before people worried about the Y2K problem or even heard about iPods.

Still in those eleven years as a part time Reston resident, I watched the area grow, prosper, and reach near gridlock at times.  I came to enjoy my three or four days a week in Reston.  My five minutes commuting down Wiehle and over to Sunrise Valley made me feel far of the community.

Home when I wasn't in Reston during those years was Roanoke, Virginia which was light years away from the Toll Road.  I could actually feel the tension drain away from me as headed west in the early years.  Eventually I went from the tension of Reston traffic to dodging truck traffic on Interstate 81.

I came back to Reston again first in January 2005 working with G3 Systems Inc. and then in the summer of 2005 working as a consultant for the National Lamba Rail and the Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership (MATP) led by Virginia Tech.  It was a short stint that was over by February 2006, but it gave me some ho hope that ties could be built between Northern Virginia and Southwest Virginia.

When I came back to Reston, I found that Marie's which used to be in the shopping center off South Lakes Drive had disappeared as had the Sunrise Chinese Buffet  where we had enjoyed so many informal lunches when I was a manager at Apple.

There were some great things about being in Reston, the convenience of being in Tyson's Corner in a just a few minutes as long as you could do it outside of rush hour was second nature.  I used to think that Town Center in winter was a southern version of Times Square.  I enjoyed our neighborhood Giant and that I could run over to Barnes & Noble or Best Buy in just a few minutes.  Phillie Mike's Subs was a great place to indulge in Cheesesteak.

These days as I reside in what I can only call a Coastal Paradise, I am about as far mentally as you can get from that intense Northern Virginia competitiveness which takes no prisoners and often requires that you race from one stop light to the next where you fully expect someone to make a left turn just as the light turns left.

I hear rumors that Apple might finally move out of their ancient building at 1892 Preston White.  In a funny twist of fate, I actually met one of the builders of Apple's building.  He now runs Garden Mountain Farm in Burke's Garden and is a regular visitor to Roanoke's Farmer's Marker.