Once a Reston resident

Something On Which NVA Residents Agree

From my six hour distance North Virginia sometimes appears to be a contentious spot.  I worked there long enough to know that agreement on most things near the beltway is about as scare as a good parking spot near Reston Town Center on a nice Sunday afternoon.

While Northern Virginia certainly does not have a monopoly on strongly held opinions,  all you have to do is look at the diverse organizations located in the area and wonder how people  stay civil with each other at all. With a culture based on government contractors and lobbyists, someone is always trying slide something over on the next person.

However, there is one thing thing that most folks can agree on and that is early July is good time to leave town.  While Congress might be in session, there is a good chance that even less work than usual might get done.  Washington and surrounding areas can be pretty miserable in the heat especially when you are supposed to show up to work in a suit and tie.

Back in my days at Apple my employees were well aware of how much I disliked an account call in July that required a suit and tie.  I am not sure I have forgiven one of my former employees yet over the hike through the Pentagon tunnel on one hot July day when the temperatures approached 100F.

So it is with good reason that residents tend to abandon Northern Virginia during the heat of July and August. The one good thing to come of this is that commuting traffic traffic decreases noticeably until after Labor Day.

Some Northern Virginia residents head across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to the Delaware Beaches and others head down Interstate 95 then over to Chesapeake and down to North Carolina's Outer Banks.  This late June traffic map shows some of the challenges in escaping Northern Virginia during the summer.  Some of the nation's worst traffic gets even more horrible as increasing numbers of people flee the city.

As native North Carolinians my wife and I grew up going to the state's beaches and have watched them change over time.  There are few of the state beaches that we have not sampled.  When I got ready to jettison corporate life and Apple decided that they had no further use for me (see my book, The Pomme Company), we investigated places to live from Assateague Island all the way south to Bald Head Island. We even went back to one of my favorite stomping grounds during my youth, Ocracoke Island.

As we were doing this survey of beaches, we took an anniversary trip to Beaufort, North Carolina.  I fell in love once again with Carteret County and its Crystal Coast.  After all the wandering I did in my earlier years including building and running a cattle farm in Maritime Canada, I had to wonder what would have happened if I had just kept my toes in the saltwater by the Point on Emerald Isle when I first visited it during the summer of 1969.  There were a number of reasons why we ended up in Carteret County, but we have stayed here because it is a wonderful place to enjoy the water and be close to the natural world.

Most Northern Virginians never make it to the area most of us call the Southern Outer Banks.  If there is little traffic you can make it from Reston to the Emerald Isle area in about six hours.  In the same no traffic scenario you could also make it Duck on the Northern Outer Banks in about five hours.  We all know there is little chance of there being no traffic.

However, once you get past Richmond, Virginia, the trip to the Crystal Coast is usually relatively traffic free. It has been a few years since I battled the traffic from Chesapeake to the Northern Outer Banks, but I can well remember spending an amazing amount of time tied up in traffic.  I also remember the challenge of making a left turn in Duck during the peak season.

While there are no guarantees, usually you can make it the Crystal Coast in about seven hours given about an hour of slow downs in the Fredericksburg area.  Once you get here, you will find a totally different experience.  This area is a family beach area and you will find lots more trees and a whole lot fewer people. In fact the mainland just before the beaches is the home to the 158,000 acre Croatan National Forest.  The mainland is closer than it is on Northern Banks and is also the permanent home of many escapees of the urban world.  We also 56 miles of the Cape Lookout National Seashore and some of the best beaches in the state in those accessible only by ferry or boat to Bear Island.

If you love to boat, there is no better place than the big coastal rivers of the area, Bogue Sound, and the easily accessible Atlantic.  If you like seafood, we still have real fishermen and places to buy fish fresh off the boat.  There are no giant restaurants but there are no giant crowds either.

I have seen all the beaches, there are none better than what you will find in Carteret County.  If you are interested in more information, try my free online travel guide to Emerald Isle or read more about the Crystal Coast at my Crystal Coast Life blog.  Our 180 plus page travel guide to the area is only $3.99 in our five star rated Kindle version or a little over $20 in the full color paperback version.

If you do escape to our beaches, you might find one like the Point that can touch you in ways that most beaches never can.

 

Reston gets beaten on a traffic innovation

With so many of my adult years intertwined with Reston's growth, it seems a little unusual to suggest that Cornelius, North Carolina, might have sneaked one by the traffic experts in Fairfax County, Virginia.

I made my first trip down HIghway 28 in 1987 and like many I can hardly believe how things have changed in the traffic landscape between the beltway and Dulles. Getting to the Reston Apple office for many years required traversing the Wiehle Avenue bridge over the Dulles Toll Road.  I can remember when the bridge got massively bigger and now there is even a Metro stop there.

Fortunately I have not had to travel the Wiehle Avenue bridge for work during the Silver Line construction.  Mostly I have seen it on occasional trips to Northern Virginia.  So I will admit to not knowing how well the bridge is handling what I am sure is ever increasing traffic.  We all know that in spite of Metro lines and ever increasing lanes, traffic never goes down.

I have actually been visiting the Cornelius-Huntersville area of North Carolina more often than Reston. It is another high growth area which might surprise many Northern Virginians who think the world ends about twenty miles out Interstate 66. I used to wonder if anyone from Northern Virginia had even heard of Southwest Virginia much less visited the area where we had a home for many years. In what might be an even more surprising turn of events, there are some spots in North Carolina that are capable of giving Northern Virginia a run for its money when it comes to traffic and growth.  One of the huge draws for the area is Lake Norman which has 520 miles of shoreline.

It turns out that Charlotte was the second fastest growing large city in the nation during 2013. Of course Fairfax County is no slouch and over the last few years, and it has gotten more people from Mecklenburg County, the home of Charlotte, that Mecklenburg County has gotten from Fairfax.  Of course I figure that is because Northern Virginians think they will fall off the edge of the earth that far south.

Like Fairfax County and all of Northern Virginia, much of the explosive growth in the Charlotte region is happening farther from the city center. Iredell County just up I77 from Charlotte is seeing explosive growth and as a result will get some express lanes. Express lanes are nothing new to Reston residents, but the bridge over I77 at Exit 28 in Cornelius just on the edge of Mecklenburg  County is unlike anything that I have seen in Reston.  As you can see from the picture I took, it is not a normal traffic flow.  I will be curious to hear if there is anything like it in Northern Virginia.

Local residents were told that this bridge was a state of the art design. I got to see it during the construction phase which definitely created some huge traffic tie ups.  The picture is looking east from the west side of the Catawba Avenue Bridge over I77.  We are on the right side of the road poised to head over to left side of the road as we begin to cross the bridge.  When we get near the end of the bridge, if you want go north on I77, you do not have to turn left across traffic because you are now on the left side of the bridge.  In spite of that when you get a little farther along, you have migrated back to the right and can easily turn right on Highway 21 South or head straight into Cornelius towards one of my favorite barbeque places. All of this lane changing takes more than a few stoplights which can prove to be a challenge.

While it might be too early to declare this either a phenomenal success or an unbelievable waste of money, traffic is moving on the bridge which is more than I can say about the construction period.  The one way to tell if it is successful is to see if a bridge or two get converted in Northern Virginia.

If you are interested in the Cornelius-Huntersville area, you might want to check out Birkdale Village.  The area reminds me of Reston Town Center except it has a mall filled with a Christmas tree instead of a skating rink. There is also a forest of Christmas trees for sale among all the trendy shops, restaurants and apartments and condos over them.

It is definitely a bustling area.  I visited my first Publix grocery store not far from Birkdale Town Center. It is not a Wegman's but it is a very nice store and there is a Whole Foods Store on the way to it.  Our dream is a little different than the urban world of either Charlotte or Reston.  However, not many folks get to live on the water by the beach so it is a good dream.