Quick Trip to North Carolina

Over the weekend I traveled down to North Carolina for non-political reasons, but I wanted to provide what some people might view as interesting observations that I made about our drive down there. In case you’re wondering: yes, I do realize this post might seem a little out of place on a political blog but I felt like writing it anyways just for the heck of it.

We drove down to the town of Highlands which is in the southwestern portion of North Carolina. Needless to say, that made for a relatively long drive since we were essentially driving from right outside Washington, DC. Before beginning the trip, in fact, I joked with a friend of mine who goes to the University of Rochester that it would have been a shorter trip to go visit her up in New York than the nine hours each way it was going to take us to travel down to Highlands.

While traveling through Virginia we took route 66 to 81 which essentially took us on a diagonal across our great Commonwealth. It also meant that we passed by many of the places Lowell and Eric stopped at during their trip to SWVA. Since they actually made their trip with some political purposes, I’ll refer you to some posts they wrote about their adventures if you want some good information and some photos (see here, here, here, and here).

Although the ride was quite long, I must admit that the views of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the various farms and towns were absolutely incredible. Living in Northern Virginia, it’s easy to sometimes forget just how beautiful Virginia truly is. The City of Salem, for instance, was one that we thought really thought would have been a photographers dream if we had the time to stop for a little while.

Perhaps the biggest thing I noticed during the trip that would relate to politics is the traffic situation. While we were traveling we hit Harrisonburg at about lunchtime on Friday. I thought that this could have potentially been a high traffic time because of people perhaps going out to lunch and perhaps some JMU students hitting to road to go home for the weekend. Although there definitely were more cars on the road, I don’t think we were ever more than a 1 or 2 MPH below the speed limit. In other words it was drastically different than if we were on a highway Northern Virginia where we would have probably faced some rather slow traffic.

What really amused me was that we hit Asheville, NC during rush hour. In Northern Virginia, highways are frequently not much better than a parking lot during at this point in the day but the rush hour in Asheville essentially meant that we had to go about 5 MPH below the speed limit. The worst of it was that the right hand land pretty much stopped at one exit, but that only lasted for about 100 yards or so. In fact, the rush hour in Asheville was very similar to what you might find at 8 or 9pm on a major highway in Fairfax County. Comparing the traffic in the different areas truly goes to show just how Northern Virginia has an extremely large population that is always trying to use the roads at the same time.

This trip was just extremely quick, so there isn’t much more worth mentioning (if any of it was worth mentioning to begin with). I would recommend to anyone who is traveling along 81 in the future to take a camera with you and allow yourself enough time to make some stops and enjoy the scenery. I believe you’ll probably find it quite rewarding to take in the beauty Virginia has to offer.