Once a Reston resident

Land of many grocery stores

When I worked in Reston one of my favorite grocery stores was Whole Foods at 11660 Plaza America Dr. in Reston.

I even wrote a post, "Food for the empire," about some Salmon I got there in 2005.  We went on to develop a taste for the Icelandic Salmon that Whole Foods would often have.

Being from one of the Provinces, Southwest Virginia, I was always amazed at the variety of grocery stores.  I think I tried them all over the years from the Gourmet Giant in McLean to Trader Joe's.

I even worked up in the Reston area long enough to enjoy a trip or two to Wegman's.

People have their favorite grocery stores and different reasons as to why they are favorites.  My son does not like the small Giant on North Shore because they don't have an automated checkout.  He often goes to the Harris-Teeter over on Reston Parkway just for that reason.

My wife really likes the small Kroger in our neighborhood in Roanoke, Va.  I like the Lowe's Foods in Cape Carteret, NC where we have a second home.

The picture at the beginning of the post is from the new Ukrop's that has just opened in Roanoke. 

For years I hauled specialty foods back to Roanoke in cooler.

Roanoke was the wasteland of grocery stores.  Harris Teeter abandoned us and even Winn Dixie left. 

The battle in Roanoke was between Kroger and Food Lion.  I could not figure out how Reston could have every grocery store under the sun, and the only variety we had in Roanoke was visiting a Kroger with a different address.

I should say that Roanoke always has had three good alternatives but they have remained small and in one case somewhat seasonal.

Tinnell's which I wrote about in Rotisserie Chicken My Way is a great small grocery store with some high quality meats. 

The Roanoke Natural Foods Coop and The Roanoke Farmer's Market are the two others which I have mentioned in numerous posts including A great fall harvest at the farmers market and more recently Changes at the Roanoke Farmers' Market.

Things started to change in Roanoke in the fall of 2005.  Fresh Market showed up in town.  They were overwhelmed for weeks.  I think they have started a small trend. 

Ukrop's opened this summer, and there are rumors of another gourmet grocery store coming to town.  I am not holding my breath for Trader Joe's but I wouldn't be surprised as it came high in a survey of what Roanoke people want.

I still love Whole Foods and am hoping to stop by one of the Raleigh ones on the way back to the beach.

We went shopping at Ukrop's yesterday, but we did not buy anything.  Later in the evening we went to the Roanoke Natural Food Coop for some Marmite which I wrote about in my post, The perfect Saturday morning breakfast, and why we do it.

I am amazed at the tremendous variety of prepared foods that are now available at some very expensive prices.  I saw pimento cheese for sale at Ukrop's for over $9 per pound.  It did not look nearly as good as the pimento cheese recipe that I have shared on the web.

My predictions are that it won't be long before no one knows how to really cook which is a shame since most of the grocery store prepared food won't hold a candle to the great food prepared at home.

Great ingredients make great foods.   The grocery stores have the ingredients sometime even tomatoes like the ones we find in North Carolina.  Paying them to make food that isn't as good as you can make on your own doesn't make sense to me.

I have yet to ever have a pot roast as good as the ones done by my wife Glenda.  Her clam chowder would put any imitation from a grocery store to shame.  Then there is the wonderful fried chicken that my mother was famous for cooking. It required a first and second step but the results were worth it.  No grocery store chicken will ever compete with that.

Then there are foods like lightly fried flounder that would be terrible warmed up.

With all this food talk, I have gotten hungry.  It is time to find some lunch.

Not always smooth sailing

Anyone who travels the Toll Road, can relate to the phrase "not always smooth sailing."

It has been at least six months since I have been on the Toll Road at all and over three years since I used it regularly.  By now perhaps the Toll Road is almost never snag free.

Driving the Toll Road on a regular basis adds some stress to you life. There are plenty of other things that can do the same thing.

Yesterday someone was bitten by a shark near Atlantic Beach, NC.  I haven't read the local paper yet, but I think this was the first attack in over thirteen years.

The water picture above was not taken yesterday, but it was taken late in the evening the day before at the western Emerald Isle beach access which is probably about twelve miles from where the lady was bitten.

The experts are blaming the attack on the water that murky because of the waves.  I would say that is a pretty good guess based on the picture.

You can check the pictures in this post, The reason it is called the Crystal Coast, to see how clear the water normally is.

The shark event will add some stress to going to the beach.  It is interesting to wach how some people handle stress.

We have recently taken up boating.  My wife and I are in our late fifties.  I started preparing for this event by taking a boating course seven months before we bought the boat.  I also hired someone to teach me the basics and spent part of the winter reading boating books and studying charts.

Still there was plenty of stress when my wife and I first launched our 20 ft skiff by ourselves and headed down the river to the Intracoastal Waterway.  As we have become more familiar with the buoys and the boat, we have gotten to the point of where we can enjoy the boating a little more.

Still it is a lot of work.   However, based on my observations, I would have faced  lots more stress if  I had just hopped in the boat and assumed that I could figure out everything by trial and error.

Some people cannot handle stress outside of their comfort zone and are not willing to do the work to expand their comfort zone. 

When faced with stress which mostly could have been handled by better preparation, they shut down and leave the work for others. I guess it is a true American trait these days to hand as much as possible of the stress and challenge over to someone else.

When we were farming in the Canadian wilderness, that was not an option.  If something broke down, you had to fix it.  If a dangerous situation occurred, you had to figure out how to get out of it or suffer the consequences.

We survived mechanical failures in temperatures as low as minus 40 Fahrenheit.  In a case where there is no one else to turn to, you often call on inner reserves that you don't even know that you have.

While knowing those reserves are there isn't going to remove all the stress from your life, it is going to make handling it a lot easier.

In the end, calling on those inner reserves is a lot better than the typical modern day American response of throwing up your hands and letting someone else solve the problem.

Not exactly Sunrise Valley

When I first visited Reston in the fall of 1987, it was already a pretty busy place to guy who had just moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

At the time we were living in Columbia, Maryland.  My guess is that in the twenty years since 1987 a lot more people in the Columbia area have found work along the Toll Road and in Reston.

The Apple office that I visited then was an all Federal one which was just off Sunrise Valley.  When I came to work in Reston in 1993, that Apple office was in the same spot.  The federal part had almost disappeared.

I guess Sunrise Valley was always my Reston main street. While Reston Parkway had Town Center and Sunset Hills had the little shopping center, I always was grounded in the area along Sunrise Valley.

It certainly grew and changed as Reston became a thriving area.  Still the Sheraton continued to be there, as did Picadeli, a Chinese restauratn, and even a gas station.  Later came the Kabob which I often enjoyed visiting with my grown kids late in the evening after we had finished our long days.

While there were changes on Sunrise Valley, they were not as massive as the changes along Sunset Hills.  Sunrise Valley retained most of its character and in my mind's eye still feels like the place I visited in 1989 even though I know it isn't.

The ocean picture above is what I consider to be one of the "main streets" of North Carolina's Crystal Coast. It is actually the coastal waters just off of Bear Island which is part of Hammocks Beach State Park near Emerald Isle, NC.

Anglers often troll parallel to the beach since the currents and wave action create a favorable feeding zone.  I recently went fishing along the coast with a friend.   

We trolled down the length of Bear Island, turned and came back up a little closer in and then went back down again at a different distance from the beach.  We were looking for fish and eventually found them including some of what I call the zucchini of the sea.

It is very different being in an area where your impressions of an area are from the sea and not from a road like Sunrise Valley.  Yet the sea can change an area even faster than a quickly growing place like Reston.

This Google Maps shot of the Point at Emerald Isle is not very old, but it is completely out of date.

You can look at the same image in Mapquest and it is still out of date as is the Microsoft Earth view.

However, if you are actually live on the scene, you can tell that the images are out of date.

Even if you can't visit, the news paper articles have all the info you need.

"We've lost 150 of beach front in the last 10 months," Ed Murphrey said, noting that that 24 feet of that has been within the last 30 days.

He was one of several property owners with homes near the Point who attended a meeting Saturday in Emerald Isle to discuss erosion taking place along approximately 1,000 linear feet of beachfront just east of the Point.

While the Point area itself has gained more than 1,000 feet of sand since the town relocated the Bogue Inlet channel in 2004, the area of concern has lost approximately 400 feet of dune and beach area since July 2005, town officials said.

It is hard to show in a picture, but this shot of a winter sunset with a tiny dot of man by the water gives you an idea of how much sand has accumulated at the Point.

I expect Reston's main street to keep changing, but probably not as dramatically as some of our sea roads here on the Crystal Coast.  Our traffic volume, unless you count fish, is a lot less so we can handle the change. 

In fact while lots of people are worried about global warming and a rising sea level, I would second the opinion that I have often heard in our area.  We could use another foot or two of water to make navigation a little easier.

Tropical heat without the benefits

I can remember many nights in the Reston area when the heat seemed to penetrate my bones.

The idea of sitting outside in the heat in the evening in Reston just seems foreign.

Perhaps if I had known someone in Reston with a pool, my view would be different, but mostly I think of Reston in the evening during the summer as hiding inside with the air conditioning.

Here on the coast we often sit on the deck and enjoy the warm evening breezes.

Almost every evening we get a beautiful coastal breeze.  During the month of May, we opened most of the windows in the house in the evening and left them open all night.

We were actually able to do that for part of June.  July has been a different story.  The heat and humidity have arrived.

The humidity has been our challenge since we have yet to see very many ninety degree days.  I came back yesterday from swimming my morning laps in our neighborhood pool and stopped to apply some liquid fertilizer to our tomatoes.

It only took a few minutes to cook me.  Going inside seemed like a trip into a refrigerator.

Staying inside while on the coast is almost as foreign as going outside is in Reston.

The real heat solution is heading out on the water.

Maybe Reston needs a canal heading to the water.  It could be a great stress reliever.

The Reston parking lot challenge

I can well remember the parking lots of Reston.  One of my least favorite ones was the nearly always crowded one over by Best Buy.  My car got a few dings there because of the small size of the spaces.

I can also remember going to Macaroni Grill and feeling like that I was going to face mortal combat to come up with a parking spot.

My daughter dislikes the parking lot over by Whole Foods the most.  My son who drives a Tundra pickup won't even go there.

Most people are aware that parking spaces come in different sizes depending on where you live.  As I pulled into the "parking space" above in Haywood Landing in the Croatan National Forest late in the day on July 4th, it occurred to me that Haywood Landing is about as far away from Reston as you can get when it comes to parking spaces.

It might be an extreme example but on the NC Crystal Coast we actually have grocery store parking lots where you sometimes see a pickup truck pulling a boat parked.

There is even a drive-in restaurant in Morehead City, El's which has random parking to accommodate boats.

I cannot even imagine pulling my boat in Reston.  A big pickup with a boat 20ft long, not counting the outboard, just does not seem compatible with Reston, though I know contractors haul around trailers all the time.

People are actually pretty courteous to those hauling a boat down here.  It is probably because the majority of the population has a boat and faces the same challenges once in a while.

I am willing to guess that the Reston Association might have something to say about parking a boat in your yard.

Then again, there actually is not a whole lot of water in Reston where you might need a boat with ninety horsepower.

I now live in a world made mostly of water, where the sunsets are often seen from the water and the trips are often up the river instead of to Town Center.

We even did a trip of sixty seven miles in our boat when we went to Shackleford Banks near Beaufort, NC.

I actually wonder if there was a place on July 4th in Reston as uncrowded as we found the spot in Croatan National Forest?

I cannot remember Reston having fireworks, but a search turned up the fact that Reston does indeed do fireworks according to the ladies at Reston Baby.com.

I am sure the Reston fireworks were grand, but the surroundings make the fireworks.

Somehow fireworks at the Emerald Isle beach which ended our day that had included the river trip and our great neighborhood parade followed by a Bogue Sound Watermelon are pretty hard to beat especially when I cannot find a parking spot for the truck and boat in Reston.

When we came in from our short trip over to the beach where we enjoyed some custard ice cream, we did watch the finale of the fireworks on the Mall, but I imagine a few Reston residents enjoyed them the same way.

Even if the fireworks and boat parking are not perfect, Reston has it strong points.

I would like to see the Milwaukee Custard folks take over our custard stand.  But I am not as crazy about seeing Five Guys enter the burger competition here since I like the small restaurants.

If you are still looking for a spot to visit where there is plenty of room to play in a  boat or even find a large parking spot, you need to book that beach house soon.  I understand from our rental people that we were 100% booked for the week of July 4th and that the remaining dates for the rest of the summer are going quickly.

Not exactly an entrance ramp on the Toll Road

When I used to leave my daughter's home in Reston for work, it was a short commute down Wiehle to Sunrise Valley over to Preston White Drive.

There were times that I had to get on the Toll Road.  The entrance ramp from Wiehle heading east to Tyson's is always pretty busy in the morning so I never looked forward to that experience.

The picture to the left is us bringing our boat out of the channel that goes to Bluewater Cove which is actually near Hancock Point on the White Oak River not far from Cape Carteret, NC.

This is actually the entrance to the White Oak River and the marked channel which takes us to the Intracoastal HIghway.

We are new to boating, but learning quickly.  We have been told that road maps tell you where you can take your motor vehicles.

Maritime charts focus more on telling you where you cannot go.  While there might seem to be endless water, much of it is very shallow and a place where you could only take a kayak.

I am sitting here trying to visualize an early morning July 3rd merge onto Route 267.  I am guess that it might have been a little lighter than last week since Northern Virginians are known for escaping from the area during July.

My guess is that it was not nearly as light as the boat traffic we saw on the river.  We were only out a couple of hours, and we might have seen three or four other boats.

Had we not anchored and fished, we might have gone on down to Swansboro and got on the Intracoastal Waterway which is sort of like a superhighway for boats since it has lots of water and is well marked.

We went by boat over to the Point at Emerald Isle yesterday.  I will not say things were crowded, but I will venture that they were more people there than I expected, still it was a long way from a crowd.

Pulling up on a speck of sand and enjoying yourself is a great way to celebrate the fourth of July.

While boaters are an independent group as a whole, they are people who depend on each other for help.

Last year I wrote a post, The Freedom to be Interdependent.

We gain strength from each other, especially when we help each other.

I would not want to try to help anyone on the Toll Road.  That is a job best left to professionals, but I sure would try to help another boater if they got stuck in the White Oak River.  Given the lack of traffic, they might end up waiting a long time before the next person came along.