Posted on by Anne

The right place, the very wrong time

Jim and I took a road trip last weekend to visit our boy in Lexington, Kentucky.

We love Lexington but don’t love the journey there from our home in SW Virginia. It’s a long haul up I-77 in West Virginia. Don’t get me wrong, the highway is a smooth conduit that connects Rt. 460 in Giles County, VA, to Charleston, WV, where we catch I-64 west out to the Lex. The problem is, all the trucks love it, too. So this time we thought we’d mix it up.

Google Maps option #2 took us deeper into the western tip of Virginia to the (beautiful) town of Abingdon, at which point we turned hard right and headed straight into southeastern Kentucky, with no venture into West Virginia at all. We were looking for mountain vistas, smaller roads, and fewer 18-wheelers.

Southeastern Kentucky is famous for its coal mines; I read that coal has been mined there since 1790. But on Thursday, July 28, the day of our trip, it became famous for flooding. Days of unprecedented, powerful rainfall brought devastating floods that wiped out houses, roads, bridges, and at the time of this writing, has killed 28 people. We didn’t see that news early Thursday morning as we set out. We hauled down I-81, stopped for coffee in Abingdon, turned right, and headed up over the mountains.

The views over Clinch Mountain were stunning. As we crossed into Kentucky, we could see waterfalls on the towering stone walls that border northbound route 23. But as we turned west onto 119, we started noticing the water in the creek next to the highway was very, very active. Churning and brown. Then we went through a town and saw folks in camo who were clearly National Guard, and not hunters.

Not long after that, the traffic stopped. The bridge on 119 had washed out. Like our fellow drivers, we turned around.

I was navigating, and at this point, I didn’t want to completely retrace our steps, but instead tried to find an alternate route north, along those picturesque mountain roads. This was the wrong choice.

We muddled north; every road seemed to follow an overflowing creek and we started seeing houses and bridges in ruins. Mud and water filled yards. At one house a car was wedged up against the front porch like it had been thrown there by a huge, angry toddler. We drove through the town of Fleming-Neon, whose Main Street was under water; we followed a side street with a stream of pick-up trucks and ATVs (y’all, so many ATVs) to get to the road on the other end of town. That road was blocked by a mudslide.

For two hours we drove back and forth like a rat in a maze, trying multiple routes that turned out to be blocked, before we finally worked our way back to a clean highway. We drove through the branches of trees that had fallen across roads, and skirted blacktop that was cracking because the dirt underneath it was washing away. We drove through water that was deep enough that we could see that other cars had been swept out of their path (by the time we got there, it had receded: “If that Subaru can do it, we can, too”).

It was a disaster. We had no business being there.

We should have backtracked immediately at the first closed road. We easily could have been stuck in Pike County. And you know what? We would have been stupid tourists draining the resources of an area that already has plenty of stress of its own. We found ourselves in a natural disaster and I thought I could be clever and find a work-around on mountain roads that I do not know. Jim’s driving got us out of that mess. And I hope I’ve learned my lesson that I need to respect bad situations a lot better.

Now I sit here safe and dry at home, fully knowing that our experience is nothing compared to what these folks will be dealing with for the next few years, at least. If you are able to donate to help, Kentucky’s Governor Beshear’s office has set up a site where you can do so. It only takes a minute. I’ve never seen any situation like what we saw on Thursday and hope you never do, either.

Posted on by Anne

A Bad Day for a Road Trip

Earlier this week, I had some business to attend to up in Fairfax, so I drove up Monday, met with some of my colleagues (face to face for the first time in more than a year!) and – the best part – hung out with my sister and brother-in-law for the first time since December 2019.

Zoom is amazing but not like this.

Work wrapped up by Tuesday at 2 pm, and since it’s a four-hour drive back to the countryside, I was motivated to get on the road before the famous northern Virginia traffic (even with so many people working from home, it’s bad, y’all). Off I went.

As I turned south onto Route 29, the road that would take me most of the way home, it occurred to me that I should stop to fill up my half-tank of gas. But oddly enough, the gas stations all seemed to have lines. I didn’t want to wait in a line; I wanted to get home. So I kept on.

Eventually I saw a little gas station without any lines, so I pulled in, only to find hand written signs that read, “No gas.”

Uh-oh.

I traveled on south, passing gas station lines so long that they pushed out into the roadway. In Charlottesville, the large-ish, busy town at the midpoint of the trip, its many gas stations featured astonishing lines. I hesitated to join any of them for fear that the station would run out of gas before my turn came, leaving me in worse shape.

My gas gauge had also crept to just below a quarter of a tank.

Once south of Charlottesville, Rt. 29 becomes really rural, really fast. I was aiming for a familiar gas and snack stop in North Garden, Virginia, just about 15 miles out of town, but when I got there, the Exxon was also out of gas. I started trying to devise a Plan B and not was coming up with any good prospects.

But three miles later, around a bend, up popped Caul’s Grocery.

Here’s how it looks on the Google Maps page

Caul’s is small. It had a line. But that line was short enough that I could join it and only be one or two cars from being able to get off of Rt. 29 and into the parking lot. I turned on my hazard lights to warn the folks flying down the road that we were parked right out there in traffic, and in short order, a line formed right up behind me. Even better, I was able to pull into the parking lot and safety.

A beautiful sight

As I waited with my window rolled down, I congratulated one fellow for being able to fill his tank, and he assured me that Caul’s Grocery’s proprietor (Mr. Caul?) had reported that he’d received a large shipment of gas just the day before. Whew. Within forty minutes or so, I myself was gassed up and ready to roll home.

My fellow travelers. That lumber truck hung out with us for awhile but then tried his luck down the road. I don’t know how he could have fit into the parking lot, frankly.

All of this adventure was the result of a ransomeware attack that had shut down the Colonial Pipeline, which delivers gas to much of the East Coast. And of course, people panicked and gobbled up gasoline. In a clear illustration of not putting two and two together, I had heard about the hack but had not considered how it might affect me. I guess I’m out of practice at traveling.

But I will always make a point of stopping at Caul’s on my way to and from points north.

Posted on by Anne · 2 Comments

Covid’s Creep to the Country

I think I’ve mentioned that where we live is fairly rural.

As with some rural communities, there may be some sense of insulation from the effects of Covid-19 as it sweeps around the world. In fact, someone I know was teased a few weeks ago at a local gardening store when he told the cashier that he would load his own mulch in order to maintain some social distance. “A CUSTOMER IS COMING TO THE LOADING AREA,” she announced over the store’s loudspeaker. “BUT HE DOESN’T NEED HELP BECAUSE HE WANTS TO SOCIAL DISTANCE!” There was chuckling. This person now buys his mulch from the Lowe’s in Rocky Mount.

(About ten days after this interaction this same establishment went to curbside-only service. No more loitering in the garden store, y’all!)

And indeed, today’s Roanoke Times reports only 16 cases of Covid-19 in Franklin County, with 19 in Bedford County just across the lake.

However, a large population of our neighbors are retired and are very respectful of the threat that the coronavirus presents. You see some folks wearing masks in the stores, and appreciate businesses’ attempts to distance their customers.

The Burnt Chimney Post Office is not playing around.

We are supporting our small businesses with take-out orders and only venturing out when we need to. But if we went to our windows to bang pots at 7 pm in support of health care workers, I don’t think anyone would hear us.

When I talk to friends in the DC area or our daughter in New York, it is clear that they are living in a world that seems very different, even if I suspect strongly that it is not.

Posted on by Anne

Country Roads

Soon after our trip to Roanoke’s Big Lick ComicCon, Jim and I went (much) further afield to visit Costa Rica with our friends Gary and Tammy.

I won’t write much about it (because this is not a travel blog), but I will note that where we were, close to the west coast, featured rolling fields full of crops and cattle, with mountains in the distance.

Not too unlike our views at home!
We even took a ride behind a GINORMOUS tractor,
which looks a little like our local snow plow in a wholly different vibe.
Of course, you’re not going to see this guy in Franklin County (photo by Gary Reinhardt).

Let me tell you, though, the roads are better here.

I had a chance to appreciate good old Virginia infrastructure yesterday when I took some of those roads to the town of Blairs in Pittsylvania County, to visit Southside Elementary School and read a book with some second graders.

I love a captive audience.

This was part of a project that brought American Association of University Women members to read about inclusiveness to kids around Franklin, Bedford, and Pittsylvania Counties. I volunteered for a farther-flung school near Danville, Va., because I hadn’t had a chance to explore in that direction.

And explore I did! Blairs is about an hour from our home, and along the way I drove through Penhook, almost all the way to Gretna.

You’re not in a hurry when you’re behind the big truck.

Then headed south on Route 29 past Chatham…

(not Chatham, Massachusetts. Or Boston, Massachusetts, for that matter)

This is a Boston Globe picture of a sticker sold by enterprising Cape Codders.
Chatham, Virginia, does not have sharks to worry about.

…through the town of Tightsqueeze, almost all the way to North Carolina. Just short of Danville, I reached my destination.

Flowers blooming in Blairs!

The teachers and administration at the school were marvelous, and the kids were, of course, charming. It was a wonderful opportunity and a lot of fun to read with them.

On the way home, I took a meandering mountain road through Witt, Mount Hermon, and Henry Fork.

Soon after I took this picture I had to, ahem, put the phone down and focus on the driving,
because the roads got a little curvy and hilly.

Eventually, I reached the familiar four lanes of Route 220, cut through Rocky Mount, and made my way back home more than a little proud of myself that after all that exploring, I found my way back. We are through with our “major” traveling for the time being, and it’s nice that a trip so far away can be echoed by the beauty at home.

Posted on by Anne

A New Look at New York

It may be no surprise that I’ve had New York on my mind lately.

And ironically enough, the week after we moved our girl from Alabama to North Carolina, we jumped on the train for a long-planned trip to the Big City itself.

The real drivers for the trip were our friends Colleen and Brett, who had taken the Amtrak from Roanoke to New York previously and were enthusiastic to do so again. And for someone who says he would never relish living there, Brett did an amazing job planning the trip, for which we are grateful.

Those guys started the day out early; the Amtrak leaves Roanoke at about 6:30 am. Jim and I joined them an hour up the road, in Lynchburg, and we picked up more friends, Michelle and Steve, just south of DC. A bloody Mary or two, and the attention of a fellow passenger — a bored and sassy nine-year-old traveling with her parents to go see Aladdin — made the hours zoom by.

Brett, Steve, and Jim in the sunshine on the Highline

In fact, the weekend zoomed by as we roamed around the island of Manhattan. We walked on the Highline and had lunch in Chelsea Market.

Hello, yummy

We saw a couple of shows!

We climbed all over the Vessel in Hudson Yards.

We checked out Little Italy, Chinatown (we were there during the Lunar New Year and it was fun seeing folks hustle around to get their supplies for the festivities), and the Housingworks Bookstore Café.

And, oh yes, Times Square, Top of the Rock, and even the M&Ms store.

It was a dizzying couple of days, made more fun by chatting with the many international visitors in our hotel and with the warm, funny, kind New Yorkers all around us. With the thought of our girl’s impending move (she found an apartment over the weekend!) looming in the back of my mind, the trip made me anticipate it — in a good way — even more intently.

Cora’s worst nightmare: tourist parents
who don’t leave

I ♡ New York? Indeed, I think I do.

Posted on by Anne · 6 Comments

Charlotte, with a Twist

We were very proud and relieved that our girl had managed to find a great job for after graduation. In late January, she was set to go to work with a large company’s office in Charlotte, North Carolina, so we spent a long weekend getting her moved in.

She flew from Roanoke to Auburn to collect her things, as I’ve mentioned.

The next morning, we got up at the crack of dawn and picked up this streamlined vehicle…

And made our way through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and into Alabama. A long drive.

This is Fancy Gap, deep in SW VA. A very impressive view and sometimes, very impressive winds
Rolling into Gaffney, SC, of House of Cards fame
…where the skies are so blue.

The next morning, Cora and I drove her car and Jim drove the loaded-up van back up I-85 for five hours to Charlotte.

We were glad to have the next day free to visit Costco and Target, as well as other sites of interest around the city.

The train to Uptown is a quick walk from her new apartment
This is a converted factory that now houses yummy food stalls (very popular with Charlottians for Sunday brunch enjoyment)
A cool, literary-themed park in the middle of the city
The park was evidently an ideal spot for photo ops among the cheer teams in town for a competition
It’s me. All broken up

We left on Monday, MLK Day. I was feeling a little blue that our “baby” was now out on her own in the world, but overall glad that she was launching herself in a nice town.

And then the next day she called to tell us that her company was transferring her to New York City. She is moving in less than two weeks.

Posted on by Anne

Road Trip Ahead

I have not been writing much here lately because the two Reynolds kids are home and I have been trying to squeeze in work writing in the early part of the day and kid activities in the afternoon and evening.

When your kids are in their 20s, a favorite activity is thrift shopping.

Alas, though, all good things (like college holiday breaks) come to an end and our boy is heading back to school tomorrow morning. He and Jim are driving out there together, leaving me and Cora with a quiet weekend. So we’re heading to Charlottesville!

Charlottesville is the home of the University of Virginia, of course, and the community sits geographically (and culturally, I think) in between busy Northern Virginia (whence many UVA students originate) and the rest of Virginia — with its tempestuous history and pretty mountains. I think that it has a cultivated country-cultured vibe.

Which is illustrated in our planned outings for the day. We are first heading to Blue Ridge Pottery, just north of the city. Then we’re going to have lunch at one of those shops that has bowls of superfoods and quinoa because that’s what the girl likes to eat and you really can’t find too much of that in our local vicinity.

And we both agree on our final stop:

This beautiful sighthttps://www.traderjoes.com/ is from the Trader Joe’s website

We don’t have Trader Joe’s in Roanoke. Our nearest one is Charlottesville. It’s going to be a well-timed, really good day.

Posted on by Anne

Top Five Holiday Takeaways this Year

We bid Cape Cod farewell on December 27, driving off into a beautiful sunrise.

Though we considered breaking the trip in half, we found ourselves pretty lucky with the traffic and decided to plow through. This meant we had a 13½ hour drive but we split up the driving and were rewarded with a full weekend at home before Jim had to go back to work on Monday.

I have had an extra week off because my place of employment closes down for two weeks at the holidays, hooray! This meant that I got to enjoy more time with the Reynolds kids at various coffee shops around the area.

We also strolled by a neighborhood horse.
And caught up with Pierre, the neighbor cat.

Besides determining that the nonstop Cape Cod – Wirtz trip is survivable, I learned (or was reminded of) at least four other notable things over this holiday break.

FIRST. That song gets it right. You know, the holiday song, “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays,” which is actually about traffic. That went through my head more than a few times in the course of the past few weeks. We were #blessed to travel between two homes and both felt pretty homey.

Having said that, though, I have drooled over pictures of some friends’ holiday vacations and I think I could work with that, too.

SECOND. Inspiration comes from unexpected places. Jim has a couple of cousins on Cape Cod, and they come to his parents’ house with their families for Christmas dinner. It is wonderful, because they are all very enjoyable folks and we don’t get to see them often enough. One of the cousins’ kids is working hard to apply for a selective position in the military, and he is seriously in tip-top shape. He runs daily, spends intentional time at the gym, and eats only things that are good for him. From the standpoint of someone (ahem, me) who has worked way too much baklava into her holiday life, this gentleman encouraged me to take a good look at my bad habits. And he’s only 24, people.

THIRD. Christmas lasts a little longer in Franklin County. I’ve talked in this blog about the solid waste sites in Franklin County, where you bring your household trash and converse for a moment with some of the nicest folks around: the fellas who tend the sites. I have also learned that if you’re tossing a particularly serviceable item, these gentlemen will encourage you to leave it on top of the dumpster/compactor in case someone else can use it. This practice goes into high gear at the holiday season, making the dumpsters look like a second Christmas, a veritable buffet of holiday gifts. At the dump site in Burnt Chimney, evidently a woman had discarded an entire box of angels, and the gentleman at the site there was offering angels to anyone who came through. That’s hard to beat.

FOURTH. The holidays end when your kids go back to school. When I was growing up, the holiday season started on October 23, with my mom’s birthday, followed by Halloween, my November birthday, Thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas, and wrapping up with my dad’s birthday on January 10 (we then rested for a minute to regroup and celebrate my sister at the end of February). Now my dad and mom are gone, but our daughter’s birthday is in early January, so the holiday energy goes strong until then.

But the thing about having kids home from college is that you know they’re going to go back, and the house will become quiet again, and the cats will get depressed, and then, you know, it’s just winter. So even though we’ll celebrate that young lady this weekend and I need to get back to work on Monday, we’ll have one more week to savor with “kids” in the house, and that’s an even better gift than anything else this season.

Here’s one more beach Christmas picture for ya.

This is Dowses’ Beach, where we used to take the kids to enjoy its mellower waves.
Posted on by Anne

Northern Exposure

This is one of those days when this blog becomes a travel blog because that’s what we’ve been doing.

Our trip to Jim’s parents’ house now takes us two days because we live that much further south. But the bonus is that instead of driving straight up I-95 through Baltimore, past Wilmington DE, and over the Jersey Turnpike, we now drive up I-81 through the wilderness of Pennsylvania.

On the way, you can see the coffee pot house in Burns Vista, VA

Easton, PA, is a good halfway point. It’s a cute town right on the Delaware River.

Photo credit to a Reynolds child.

On the second day of travel we roll through New Jersey, New York, Connecticut (not such bad traffic on Christmas Eve!), Rhode Island, and on into Massachusetts.

Frozen waterfalls on the rocks in New Jersey
The Bourne Bridge over the Cape Cod Canal is a welcome sight
A relaxing scene at the end of the trip.

I hope that if you have travels this season they are safe and happy!

Posted on by Anne · 2 Comments

A Long Trip Home

It’s funny how a dreadful event can refocus your perspective very quickly.

Our travel home from Alabama went a little bit sideways, leaving me grateful for everything that didn’t go wrong.

As background, the easiest way to get to Auburn, Alabama, is through Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta. (It’s such a big airport that even Roanoke’s little airfield offers direct flights!) From there, you rent a car and drive straight down I-85 for an hour and a half. Once you cross the Chattahoochee River you know you’re almost there.

Jim, Cora, and I had managed to book our flights home separately but all ended up on the same flight home to Roanoke, an afternoon flight that allowed us to get out of town in a leisurely fashion. The rest of the family had earlier flights, so they scooted out of town with dispatch. As we finished up our breakfast, I got a call from an Atlanta number.

Was I ever surprised to hear one of my favorite voices on the other end: my sister, Sarah. She started the conversation with, “Anne? Everything is okay, but…”

And with those four words, your heart skips because you know that everything is not okay. And it wasn’t. She had stopped off of I-85 in Union City, just south of Atlanta, to refill her gas tank. While doing so, another car drove up to the pump next to hers (as they do). When she turned around to attend to the gas pump, someone got out of that car and into hers and sped off. With all of her possessions.

With a presence of mind that I can only aspire to, she ran into the gas station, called 9-1-1, borrowed a phone, and got in touch with her family, including me. Suddenly grateful to be packed up a little early, we jumped in the car and made our way to Union City. By the time we got there, Sarah had spoken with the police and made a report.

And we had formulated a plan. We picked her up and drove with her to Hartsfield-Jackson. Jim and Cora flew home, but Sarah and I stepped up to the National Rent-a-Car counter and drove ourselves to the airport in Roanoke (me: “Sarah, Sarah, look! It’s Fancy Gap!”). We were met there by her husband, who had spent the afternoon cancelling credit cards, acquiring a new phone for my sis (at the Apple store in mid-December), and driving the four hours from northern Virginia.

She wrote about the experience on social media, making the cautionary point that YOU SHOULD ALWAYS TAKE YOUR KEYS WITH YOU WHEN YOU FILL UP YOUR CAR, but also expressing her great relief that things worked out much better than they could have.

That’s some relief that I share.