At my daughter's house in Reston which backs up against Fairfax County Park, comes very slowly.
It is that way because of the huge trees. Only in the afternoon does the sun have the opportunity to cook the townhouse.
Waking up here on the Carolina coast is really different than waking up in Reston.
After a few days of heat, and we will have plenty more, we have gone back to running the air conditioning for a few hours during the day and sleeping with the windows open during the night.
All we hear in the mornings are the birds singing. We are near the water at the far end of our subdivision, and there are no government workers going in early trying to beat the traffic. Even the fishermen seem to sleep in until late morning.
It is rare to hear a car before 7:30 though my wife did have to try to sleep through an early morning tractor bush hogging a vacant lot not far from us the other day.
A very weird thing happened yesterday, we heard a couple of sirens in the middle of the morning. It was only then that we figured out that these were the first sirens that we had heard since moving here last September.
Even in our normally tranquil spot on the mountain by Roanoke we regularly hear sirens. When I am visiting Reston, I quickly learn to make them part of the background noise.
It is always interesting to see what value we attach to different things. Reston is full of great jobs, but watching the sun rays chase the morning mists off some water probably isn't a common Reston activity.
Homes in the Reston area in spite of the slight softening of the real estate market still cost an arm and a leg. Land is at a premium because of Reston's convenience. Here on the coast land is valued by how close it is to the water.
I live in a waterfront community near Cape Carteret, NC. There are still a few single family homes here that are still under $400K, and you even pick up a fantastic home like this one up the street from me for under $500K. Down the road in a non-waterfront community, you can get single family detached homes for around $200K. They are still under ten miles from the beach.
I wonder what a home like the $499K one up the street from me would cost in Reston. Even ignoring the fact that a Reston location isn't going to let you hop in a boat and be on the Intracoastal Waterway in ten minutes, I would guess the price would be at least 50% more.
A morning serenade from the birds near the water should be worth more.
