Route 1 in Two Years
Getting back into my road trip routine
As you may gather if you’ve been a reader of this newsletter for a while or followed my writing elsewhere, a big component of my work is taking road trips, visiting places, and driving around. I often have only a loose plan for where I’m going to be, and stop a lot to snap pictures, take notes, check out a store, etc.
The final pre-COVID day I spent out like this was Thursday, March 5, 2020. My wife and I went to dinner that weekend, but that Thursday stands out as the last day I basically wasn’t thinking about the pandemic. I had been planning to do a drive around Maryland, getting some pictures around my old grad school stomping grounds in and around College Park, and having dinner at a Chinese buffet out in Lanham that I had frequented in school.
There was really only about a six-month period between settling into school and meeting my wife where I was completely free to do this kind of thing. Yet those long drives and solitary buffet dinners stand out in my mind as an entire period of my life. I was homeschooled through high school, went to college 40 minutes from home, and didn’t have a driver’s license till my senior year of college, so simply having a car, an apartment, a little spending money, and nobody else around was novel and exhilarating.
That early March day, Maryland had just announced its first COVID-19 cases that morning, and Virginia as of yet had no confirmed cases. This was long before we knew that it had probably already been circulating at least a couple of months. So I diverted my trip to the Route 1 corridor in Virginia, and tried a new Chinese buffet along there. (Funny enough, it happened to have a nearly identical set of dishes as my old favorite in Maryland.)
Route 1, which also runs through College Park, was the old north-south highway, whose long-distance travel function was mostly replaced by I-95. Like many bypassed U.S. Highways, there’s a lot of neat old stuff along it. But given the population and economic growth in this region, it isn’t a lonely bypassed road but a major, traffic-choked local travel and commercial corridor.
The segment I like to drive, from just south of the city of Alexandria to just north of Fort Belvoir, is a continuous commercial and residential corridor of about 6 and a half miles. It’s bounded by a set of several old motels at the north end and a Roy Rogers at the south end. After that, development lightens up considerably until you reach the Woodbridge corridor. A lot of material I’ve used already, and a lot I have yet to use, comes from drives like this, and specifically from this dense, layered, fascinating stretch of highway. (This post, for example, or this one.)
A couple of weeks ago, I did this trip again. I’ve been meaning to do it for the whole last year, first as a sort of way for me to symbolize the end of the pandemic, and second as a familiar trip that nonetheless always yields something new. This trip went better than my other recent one, and so did the dinner.
Same drive, same buffet, same plate of sushi and hibachi noodles. Same post-dinner walk around a huge thrift store. Same toll-free route home that runs south past Fort Belvoir and then back northwest on the Fairfax County Parkway. Two days after my March 2020 trip, Virginia announced its first case—at Fort Belvoir. “Gee, I went to Virginia because we didn’t have any cases, and I drove right past Fort Belvoir,” I told my wife that Saturday morning.
Less than two weeks later, “2020” began. At that March buffet dinner, I was reading news stories about Bernie Sanders and the primary. It’s really hard to believe that was only a little more than a year ago.
I’ve got plenty more of these trips planned. I joke to my wife that they’re an excuse to try lots of different buffets. It’s a bit scary to not have the security of a full-time job. But full-time jobs in this field aren’t that secure, anyway. I’m heartened by the reactions I’ve gotten to my work, and I’m enjoying the flexibility to explore and learn more about my region.
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