Once a Reston resident

Seeking refuge from shopping fever

2009-11-04T22:37:55-05:00

I am remember well many of the falls that I covered my Reston years. The city seems to snap back from summer like summer never even happened. The buzz of traffic goes back to its normal level.

As the temperatures start dropping, holiday fever creeps into everyone's thoughts. Shopping while plentiful in Northern Virginia can be stressful. Just finding the time, a parking space, and someone to wait on you can be a huge challenge. I often found myself sneaking off to LL Bean to do a little early shopping just so I would not get caught in the crowds.

Once you get into the shopping mode, it is hard to unwind or stop. It is not like you can really escape places to shop in Northern Virginia. At one time, your home could be a place safe from shopping, but now with Internet and catalog shopping, even the home has become a place of shopping. And if you happen to turn your television on, you will be reminded of that more than once.

In a rural area like North Carolina's Crystal Coast, escaping shopping is not the problem, finding a place to shop is the challenge If we want a serious department store, we have to drive eighteen miles. Now before you jump the gun and apply Northern Virginia standards to the trip, the eighteen miles takes less than eighteen minutes. Still the trip is not something you make in the evening unless you are serious about buying something.

So here we are on the coast in place with much less of an opportunity to shop. On top of that our weather most fall is very nice. This fall it is exceptional. We have seen great weather even this first week of November. I have a theory that says, the better the outside weather, the less people are interested in shopping. That is especially true if they live in an area where playing in the outdoors is easy and rewarding.

Our area which is near the beaches of Emerald Isle happens to fit that description perfectly. So the question is, "Why would you want to shopping when you could go boating or fishing." The simple answer is that you would not.

Perhaps that is why no one here on the coast seems to be thinking about the holidays. The weather is far too good to be fooling around with shopping. This is still shorts weather. It is so nice outside we have been cleaning and washing down the house in preparation for cooler weather. I still have green tomatoes growing on my tomato plants. Our roses are still blooming. The fish are still biting, and I have not been in a department store in months.

This afternoon as the day was winding down, we climbed in our boat and lowered it in the water for a quiet journey out into the river to watch the sun slip behind the horizon. Had I been in Reston, I might have made a run to Tyson's to visit Bean's. It would have just been another trip to a mall that I would forget as soon as it happened.

Tonight's sunset will not be forgotten so easily. It is a memory that my wife and I will enjoy together. We could only hear a few birds out on the river. It was a wonderful way to end a day. It was certainly the right spot to escape any shopping fever that might try to infect us from up north.

Of shorter days and supermarkets

2009-09-28T09:46:59-04:00

I recently heard El Supermarcado on North Shore might be closing. I hated to see the Giant leave before it. The tendency to have larger and larger grocery stores just makes life more difficult as far as I am concerned. I know there are plenty of grocery stores in the Reston area but often parking and traffic make them difficult to access.

As I write about Reston from my perspective of the North Carolina coast, I try to compare shopping in Reston to the way we treat our grocery stores during the summer tourist season.

We try to make the bulk of our purchases from Monday until Thursday. With absentee owners streaming in on Fridays, and tourists checking into their homes on Saturday and Sunday, the grocery stores look like locusts have been in them on those days.

We are lucky because of the summer population surge, we have four large supermarkets, two Food Lions, one Lowes, and a Piggy Wiggly all within about five miles. Even in the worst traffic you could be at any of them in about ten minutes which should tell you that our traffic never gets very bad.

We also just got a new Harris Teeter in Morehead City about twenty minutes away. In that same area there is also a Walmart grocery store there. With the tourists gone our grocery stores are uncrowded almost all of the time. In fact some of us are worried that the new Harris Teeter might not be getting enough business to hang around.

It is always a pleasure to have the great variety of vegetables and fruits that larger stores like Harris Teeter bring. When a grocery store leaves, there is some sense of loss. I know the Ukrop's Store in Roanoke, Va is closing this October. Roanoke is a Kroger town with only a few Food Lions and on Fresh Market to help the few independents out. But some of us will Ukrop's. We bought most of our Thanksgiving dinner there last year.

I do not think Northern Virginia has a problem with grocery store variety with places like Wegman's in the background, but I do know that quick local access is a problem. Going to the grocery and being back home in fifteen minutes is probably a bigger challenge than it is here on the Carolina coast or in Roanoke where you are never very far from a Kroger.

As the days get shorter, my memories turn to the days when we lived in Canada. Just getting to a grocery store often meant a thirty minute drive in good weather. It was typical to only go to the store once a week. In winter snow storms, going to the grocery store just did not happen. When we first lived in Canada in the early seventies there were no large supermarkets in the rural part of Nova Scotia. Fruit and fresh vegetables were a challenge in the winter. Even when we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1984, grocery stores closed at 6 PM on Saturday and were closed all day on Sunday.

This morning I read a story in the Toronto Star about the challenge of buying groceries in Canada's far north. After reading about milk costing almost nine dollars per half gallon, I guess I am not going to worry too much about losing a grocery store here or there. I think we are covered pretty well, though I will miss the Ukrop's bakery on my trips to Roanoke.

I never became a El Supermercado shopper so if in truth it is disappearing, it will happen without me ever having visited.

It is a beautiful day on the coast of North Carolina so I am going to take my own advice "Carpe Beach Diem."

Dreaming of a home

2009-08-28T23:05:45-04:00

Being in the real estate business I deal a lot with people's dreams. Having lived and worked in the Reston area, I know well the challenges of finding affordable housing.
Reston is a great place with lots of jobs and plenty of shopping, and it is conveniently located to just about everything except reasonable priced housing.
Every area has its threshold of housing prices. In some places you have to be an executive to afford a home, in others teachers can buy homes. It all depends on the area, the density of housing, the cost of land, the price of labor and a number of other factors.
We have all been through a roller coaster ride on housing prices. When my daughter bought her townhouse in Reston, she had to race other buyers to the good properties. Today things have changed, but housing is still pretty expensive in Reston.
Here on the coast, you can buy a new three bedroom, two bath home with 1,600 square feet for under $170,000 and still be less than fifteen minutes from the beach. If you can deal with a smaller home built a few years ago, you can get a home for $160,000 or under. A new home like the one pictured in the post in a gated community like Bluewater Cove where I live will cost you something over $300,000 but less than $400,000 unless you want to be on the water.
All those prices look pretty cheap compared to what it costs to buy a single family home in Reston. The big difference is jobs. Jobs are scarce on the coast of North Carolina, but the cost of living including property taxes is also very attractive to most people including retirees.
We end up with lots of small business owners, people who cannot live without the ocean, and some people who enjoy our warm climate no matter what their age.
Every time I write about the Crystal Coast on the blog Crystal Coast Living, I think about how different our area is from places like Reston. We might have half a dozen traffic jams a year lasting a few minutes when everyone tries to check into their rental properties at the same time on the fourth of July weekend and a few other popular weekends.
Other than that there are lots of differences besides housing prices. It should not come as a surprise that we have lots of space since we have a 158,000 acre National Forest on one side and miles and miles of an undeveloped National Seashore on the other side.
Because of all the space and fewer people, it gets dark here at night. There is no glow, and you can see the stars in the skies. We also still have old fashioned events like a covered dinner supper at church. It is not a stretch to think that by November all the new waitresses who came in during the summer will know you. The old ones never forgot you.
As I remember those days creeping along the toll road to Tyson's early in the morning, I wonder why you cannot have the jobs of a Reston in a place where people can afford to live. I still remember my area associate when I was director of federal sales for Apple. She had to drive an hour and forty five minutes morning and night in order to get to an area where she could afford a home. She would have been very well paid by standards down here.
It is a stretch to think that lots of Reston style jobs will ever make it to the North Carolina coast. However, the loss falls more on the companies who fail to understand how much more productive people can be when they do not spend half their lives commuting.
Those of us who manage to scrape by down here have a lot of fun, and the air we breath is first rate. The sky is blue and the clouds are white. When our feet need some work, we just go for a walk on the beach.
Having fun is as simple as dropping your boat in the water and heading out to the Inlet. In the case of going to the Inlet, the journey is definitely the reward.
It is a good life even without fancy jobs. I can even handle the mowing job for my yard without too many complaints.

A better kind of Sunday traffic

2009-07-19T16:23:50-04:00

I remember when I first started visiting Reston years ago. In the late eighties people thought Reston was never going to make it.
Then in mid-nineties I can remember talking to people who thought Reston was going to become so crowded that it would be impossible to go to a grocery store on the weekend.
I think it is safe to say that Reston will muddle on with its traffic.
My son hates to shop for groceries during day in. Reston because of the traffic and small parking places.
Recently I have been thinking that it would neat to have a grocery store on the water. I guess my dream store would have plenty of places to tie up a skiff. You could hop off the boat and do your shopping. Then it would take just a few minutes to get home.
The boats in the pictues are in the Intracoaslal Waterway. I bet most Reston people would trade our water traffic for their car traffic.
Unfortunately I doubt that Lake Anna in Reston would make enough connection to replace the roads. The farmers market seems to work well, but there is just not enough water in Reston for my waterside grocery to work.
These perfect beach days are behind all my dreams. Once we get to January, I will be back to reality.

The year without a summer?

2009-07-06T07:32:48-04:00

Where is the brutal Northern Virginia heat? I understand that the temperatures only got into the seventies yesterday. That's definitely not like July in Reston.
Of course things are all relative. My friend in New Jersey was begging for some seventies a week or two ago. Then there is my friend in Halifax, Nova Scotia who seems to be stuck at 55 degrees and drizzle. Last week I noticed temperatures in the thirties in Edmonton, Alberta.
Part of the continent seems to be having trouble finding summer. I would have never expected this to happen to Reston which has never seemed to have any trouble heating up in July. I always thought heat in July was a part of the Reston experience.
Even this week, the Reston forecast has four days in the lower eighties and one day when it does not get out of the seventies. For the heart of the summer that is strange weather.
It is exceptionally hard for me to relate to those temperatures since we have been through a few weeks when ours have regularly touched ninety degrees. We have even seen some mid-nineties and a couple of times got in the upper nineties which is unusual for the beach area of the Southern Outer Banks.
This past weekend I was handing out fliers at the Bluewater GMAC Rental check-in. I was in shorts, tee shirt, straw hat, and Birkenstocks just to stay cool. I stayed for only two and one half hours because I ran out of fluids and was worried about getting dehydrated in the heat. Interestingly many of the people checking in from the north were making comments about the blue skies and heat.
I heard a number of people say that it was nice to finally find summer. I do not pretend to be a weather expert, but I expect we will hear about this trend soon. The situation is bad enough that I have not had any communication from my Boston friends in a month. Boston seems particularly sensitive about their summer weather.
I can understand why. When you miss summer, things like home grown tomatoes and grilling outside disappear. The quick dip in the swimming pool late at night does not happen. One of the things I enjoy most is going to the grocery store late in the evening over on the beach. I like the blanket of warmth and the coastal breezes that inevitably greet me as we get out of the car.
Summer is still here along the beaches of Emerald Isle. I suspect we still have some rental spots available. There are plenty of ways to have fun in our heat especially if you get out on the water.
But if you cannot make it, we will try to enjoy summer for you. Of course there is still August which is almost always hot and humid in Northern Virginia. You can always hope.

Waiting for the calls

2009-06-21T16:27:19-04:00

Sometimes it is hard to believe that Reston is on the same planet that we inhabit. As I have been relaxing while waiting for my father's day calls, I have noticed that Reston is a balmy 75 degrees Fahrenheit this Sunday.
That pales in comparison to the 93 degrees that we have recorded here on the Carolina coast.
Our heat has been great for some vegetables like tomatoes.
The lack of northern warmth would not be so unusual except it seems to be very persistent this year. From Northern Virginia north seems to be having a hard time with summer. We have two grown children in Reston.
One of our children has been complaining that her flowers need sunshine. At the same time we have been hearing warnings to stay inside between 11 AM and 4 PM in order to miss the worst of the sun and heat.
As of four o'clock this afternoon all three of my grown children have made their father's day calls. We ended up with a voice mail from one since she underestimated the time it takes us to go from church to home. Still I appreciate hearing from our children on father's day. Most of our other calls are initiated from our end.
Sometimes I think the old fashioned phone is becoming a lot art.
I went away to military school at the age fourteen. I got in the habit of calling home either Saturday or Sunday of each week. When my wife and I moved to Canada, we kept up the tradition.
There has been a subtle change over the years, and Reston being the technological leading edge that it is, has been at the fore front.
We used to call a place and talk to anyone that picked up the line. Now it is more typical to call a cell phone with pretty good odds of talking to one specific person. I would guess a high percentage of Reston homes might only have cell phones.
Sometimes a phone call required some subtle negotiations to get to the right person.
With cell phones taking over homes, a little of the mystery is gone.
It is a little different down here at the beach. Cell phone coverage can have a few holes, but even here people are more and more dependent on their cell phones. At our office, it is very rare for anyone to be put through to voice mail. Mostly we redirect people to cell phones.
Of course if someone has both your cellphone and land line phone numbers, use of the land line number can be a gamble on not getting you. Whereas a cell phone call might get someone almost all the time assuming the person carries the phone.
We recently switched our land line to an Internet one through our cable company.   Now caller ID is on our television screen.
You can depend on technology to continue to change us in subtle ways while the weather continues to do what it pleases.
Tonight after the worst of the heat, we will be sneaking over to the beach again like we did last night. It is a way to relax and get out of the heat, but I still have my cell phone in my pocket even when I am fishing in the surf.

Where bridges still rule the road

2009-05-25T22:41:38-04:00

With a world defined by huge multiple lane highways, anyone from Reston who ventures down to Beaufort, NC must think they have dropped off the face of the earth. After all the main roads narrow to two lanes.
Then there is the famous Galllant's Channel drawbridge which seems to open at the most inconvenient times. Yesterday we were headed to Beaufort from Cape Carteret with the hope of seeing the replica ships, the Nina and Pinta.
We were on a tight schedule since I had to work at 1 PM in the Bluewater Real Estate office. Just as we were approaching Beaufort, the traffic ground to a halt as the drawbridge opened.
Since I have been here on the beach for nearly three years, I no longer get very upset about delays. I have lost the tan line on my watch arm. That happened when I stopped wearing a watch. However, I was wondering how the Maryland and Virginia cars who zoomed past me on the short causeway were handling the delay.
I know from experience that North Virginia people do not like to stop even for red lights. They can also get a little aggressive around parking spots at their favorite shopping and eating spots.
Imaging the morning Toll Road grinding to a halt because of a drawbridge would send chills down the back of anyone who has tried to make a meeting before nine AM meeting in Tyson's Corner.
I am not sure why boats have the right of way over traffic, but I guess it adds charm to Beaufort and give visitors something to talk about.
It is a short wait and much more enjoyable than a two hours waiting in traffic as they clean up an accident on the two lane traffic.
To create memories that you want to keep and will help you forget drawbridges, read this, What Makes a Vacation Memorable?

Reston worries about its housing market?

2009-05-15T11:21:41-04:00

I see from this Restonian article that the real estate blahs are also wandering the streets of Reston which at one time seemed to be immune from any bumps in the real estate market.
Our streets as you can see from the picture look a little different here on the coast.
Real estate has seen some similar challenges on the coast, but we have not seen many foreclosures. Also on the coast of North Carolina we never got too far beyond reasonable housing. Our market even at the peak had new single family homes available for $219,000, and those homes were just seven or eight miles from the beach.
Now that the bubble has gone from home prices, you can buy one of those homes for $189,000. We still have our share of more expensive homes, but the reality is that you can get a really nice three bedroom home with two baths in a community on the water with a swimming pool, clubhouse, and boat ramp for under $330,000. Given the grand scale of American real estate, that is still a deal since the taxes on the home would be just slightly over $1,000.
Real estate is a very local business. It can be very weird. I can remember when we were looking for my daughter's townhouse in Reston. She got faxes every morning, and often before she saw them, the homes they were gone. She ended up in a great spot, but paid $250,000 for a townhouse that was 30 plus years old.
At the time the price seemed ridiculous, but it was bought far enough before the bubble, that she got a great buy. Now we are close to the bottom of the real estate cycle. There are some great buys especially here on the coast where there are few buyers. Yet most people have seen their portfolios decrease enough that buying a second home is seen as impossible.
Still the ones who manage to come up with the money will find some great buys. I am getting ready to list this home in Pine Knoll Shores. It occurred to me that $599,000 would likely buy a lot less in Reston than here on the coast.
The Pine Knoll Shores home is across the street from Bogue Sound, around one half mile from gated private parking for beach access which costs $100 per year, and has over 3,300 square feet. You can hear ocean waves from the immaculately landscaped yard. The soundside golf course is just down the street as is the local marina. More information is at this link on the Crystal Coast electronic village.
In Reston you pay for being close to the Toll Road and easy access to Washington. Here on the Crystal Coast you pay for access to water.
They are different worlds. Traffic is the bane of a Reston resident existence. We like to see some traffic since it means tourists are coming and local businesses will thrive.
Heat in Reston slowly cooks you, heat here on the coast makes the ocean waves inviting.
A weekend in Reston often means fleeing the city and sitting in traffic. Here we worry more about boat traffic on the weekend than car traffic. Fortunately the ocean is pretty big and the county has more water than land.
A local eating place in Reston is often a large chain restaurant, a local place here is often like the Fairway, a small family run restaurant.
Reston area jobs are often high paying. Here on the coast, jobs are a challenge to find.
The prices in our respective real estate markets reflect those realities. Given a choice people would probably chose Reston style jobs in a pleasant laid back coastal environment like Carteret County.
Unfortunately it does not work that way. The good news is that people often find times in their lives to appreciate places like Reston and NC's Crystal Coast.
I still miss the convenience of Reston, but there is a lot that I no longer, but my priorities have changed. You cannot even tell that I ever wore a wrist watch.
Read more about North Carolina's "secret to share" at the Crystal Coast Living Blog.

Ah, Reston takes a shortcut to summer

2009-04-25T22:44:34-04:00

When I came in after my kayaking trip this afternoon, I sat down to check my email. I happen to check the Weather Underground site and found that Reston was flirting with 91 degrees Fahrenheit.
I immediately got a flash back to some springs long ago when Northern Virginia would have a couple of weeks of spring weather and then go directly to the miserable summer heat that often engulfs the area.
While I managed to several of these years almost without spring, they were never fun.
First off I was usually stuck in a suit during the worst of the heat. I can even remember hiking the tunnel to the Pentagon on one particularly nasty day when the temperature reached into the nineties and the humidity made the walk almost deadly.
Of course the city air is filled with heat and some fumes which does not help the situation. It does make you really appreciate air conditioning. I know that I would come home and get out of my suit and into shorts as quickly as possible.
Since I am not longer with Apple, I am a little luckier, starting in March my work uniform as a Realtor on the NC Coast switches to shorts. While Reston and other inland spots are cooking in spring heat, we are enjoying a climate cooled by ocean breezes which will also warm us in the fall.
This is a great time of year along the coast. We even took our boat out on Friday. It proved to be a great day. Perhaps spring will try to take hold of Reston's weather once again. But unfortunately, I suspect heat will be a way of life for the DC metro area until next winter.

Perhaps a little of this would help

2009-04-20T22:54:03-04:00

I checked the Restonian this evening and was surprised to find a story about a murder in Reston. It made me think back to this afternoon when I was standing on a deck watching waves crash into the beach here on the North Carolina coast.
While waves cannot wash away crime, but they certainly help to soothe the modern mind.
I always felt very safe in Reston. I am not sure why since it would be a rare morning that you could not hear sirens somewhere in the background noise.
Maybe I felt safe in Reston because the news in the Washington Post overwhelmed anything that might have happened in Reston. Also news in a modern community like Reston does not travel by a grapevine. A lot happens that you never hear about personally.
If a crime takes place, you likely will not find about it unless the police knock on your door and interview you to see if you know something about it.
Here in the world of small towns on the coast, news does travel by grapevine. We were driving out of our subdivision this afternoon as one of the children of some friends was walking home from the bus stop. She flagged us down to tell us about an outside light fixture catching fire on a neighbor's house the previous evening.
We live about five houses away but heard nothing, certainly not the fire truck. We continued on our journey to my workplace to check my snail mail and got another version of the story from the daughter of the 88 year old lady who lives in the house.
When we returned home, we were flagged down by yet another neighborhood youngster. In the space of a couple of hours, we heard three versions of what happened.
The first thought might be that so little happens here that anything is exciting news. There is a certain amount of truth to that. However, our neighborhood would be much more connected than a Reston one.
Some of it just has to do with numbers. Our little piece of heaven, Bluewater Cove, only has forty two homes. While we do not know everyone, we know several folks well and many others well enough to strike up a conversation.
It is a completely different world than Reston. There is a fair of community interaction here, and some things happen that are unlikely to happen in Reston.
This past weekend, I was backing out of my driveway as my neighbor was mowing his yard. I motioned to him that he could just take his riding mower over and do mine while he was at it. We both laughed, and I headed on out not thinking any more about my joke.
When I came home late Saturday evening, the joke was on me. I was surprised but not shocked to find that he had mowed my yard. Not many people have neighbors who look after each other like some do in our subdivision.
There is a pretty good support network here. Finding someone to check on things or feed the cat when we are out of town is not very difficult. We often have to worry more about whose feelings we might hurt if we do not ask them for help.
Big cities like Reston are great in their own right. Usually very good jobs are available, and you do not have to worry about everyone knowing your business. Every service known to man is usually available.
But we all those services and people comes some less desirable people and certainly more crime than we would see in our rural area.
Living in a peaceful rural coast area is pretty easy on the nerves. There is a good deal of comfort in knowing that we live in a much smaller community where people have the time to get to know each other and perhaps keep an eye on those who need watching.
I suspect the 88 year old lady who had a total stranger bang on her door and tell her that her house was on fire appreciates his efforts almost as much as those of the neighbor who went to his own home and got a hose and put out the fire using another neighbor's spigot well before the fire truck arrived.
Sometimes it is good to be out in the boonies near those waves. For a story of some friends visiting us on the coast check out this post, On Being the Local Experts For Visiting Friends.