Tag: Virginia

  • Highway to Park

    A park near my home sits above an interstate highway leading into Washington, DC. Here, builders tucked the roadway into a little valley leading downhill towards the Potomac River and put a concrete lid above it. Drivers on Interstate 66 enter a tunnel briefly before returning to daylight and crossing the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge into…

  • Where They Lived as Children

    My recent trip to western North Carolina was like the gift that kept on giving for Twelve Mile Circle article ideas. Sadly I’ve reached the end of the line on that thread so this will be the last article that contains a connection to that earlier adventure. As noted in a prior installment, I enjoyed…

  • Of Of

    Mouth of Wilson. I used it as a waypoint during my recent county counting quest. Otherwise I put it out of mind as I drove through an expansive rural corner of Virginia. It came to mind again a little later. I passed a sign for another town about an hour farther north and east, Meadows…

  • Western North Carolina, Part 6 (County Counting Adventures)

    Each Twelve Mile Circle journey has its own specific objectives. The western North Carolina adventure focused heavily on the burgeoning craft brewing scene. Collectively they also share common objectives, principally the pursuit of geo-oddities along with opportunities to pad my county counting totals. I thought I did well. I adding eighteen new counties with fourteen…

  • Virginia Silver and Gold

    Living in the Commonwealth for so many years, I guess it presupposes I’ll notice Virginia mentioned in out-of-context situations. Such was the case with Virginia City, Montana which I saw while researching presidential counties. It served as the seat of local government in Madison County, which derived its name from James Madison, the fourth U.S.…

  • That Other Warsaw

    In the recent Not the City article I focused on Richmond, not the city of course, but the county. There, the local government centered on a village called Warsaw (map). That seemed like an exceptionally odd choice. There wasn’t a large Polish diaspora on Virginia’s Northern Neck as best as I could tell. Why name…

  • Not the City

    I examined a stack of family files online and I learned that a distant relative lived in Houston, Texas. I’ve traced numerous family members back through there so it didn’t surprise me. However the records didn’t make sense as I read through them. Geographic identifiers seemed unfamiliar and out of place. Then I slowly realized…

  • Reversible

    It dawned on me recently, as I drove around the Washington, DC area, that there seemed to be an inordinate number of reversible road lanes that switched directions on regular schedules. The example that got me thinking about this was a one-block section of Washington Boulevard (map) on the western edge of Arlington’s Clarendon neighborhood.…

  • Nest of Spies

    I’ve mentioned several times before the extremely localized nature of many geo-oddities. Often I’ve used my very own hometown of Arlington County, Virginia as an ongoing proxy. So I created a bicycle ride over the weekend that highlighted a specific theme that I’ve not discussed before. Being located so close to the nation’s capital, Arlington…

  • Bluefield on the Border

    When I was asked to chauffeur a runner to a half-marathon with a course that crossed between the conjoined cities of Bluefield on the border between Virginia and West Virginia, how could I say no? A long weekend of fall foliage and geo-oddities? I felt like I was dropped into an episode of Weekend Roady.…