Over, already? (a year, and a vacation)

I'm back from my travels. I've not been on a bike since Saturday, the 24th. It's New Year's Eve. Jenn is in the kitchen fixing chili for tomorrow's Polar Bear Ride and Chili Cook-Off.

The trip was a great break from the norm for me. We took the new-to-us Toyota rather than fiddle with the expense of renting a car.

The focus of the trip was a more-or-less annual visit to my grandmother's house in Williamsburg, Virginia. My grandmother turned ninety-five early in December, outliving her own mother by at least three years and her husband, my grandfather, by a few months so far. She is still in good spirits, despite that her hearing and eyesight are not very good. My father now lives with her most of the time, going to his home in Staunton for a few days now and again to help my stepmother with things around that house.

That house. My grandparents bought the house in 1947 or so, and have been there since. It was built in the early 1930s to demonstrate the then-new concept of building residences with lots of concrete. The outer walls are concrete block, the floors are concrete (with hardwood flooring over it), the foundation and such are concrete... In the living room, there hangs a framed reprint of an advertisement that features their house, touting the fire-safety and economical aspects of the style of construction. The house has a screened-in porch across much of its rear wall, done for them in the 1950s by the man who was the primary builder when the house was first erected. There is a small bedroom and bathroom off the dining room, that was converted from the garage that was originally there. When I was a small child, my great-grandmother used it as her bedroom (yes, my grandmother's mother, who was 92 when she passed in late summer of 1969--I was eight years old at the time). That house has been something of a touch stone for me throughout my life--all the places I've lived, all the places I've been, I've always been able to think about that house as a grounding point. For several years, I spent the nights of my visits sleeping on that porch, in part to keep my grandmother from having to launder sheets after I left (or having to launder them myself before going...), but mostly because the porch was such an important part of every visit I've ever had there.

Until my grandfather ceased his gardening activities in the 1990s, just about every visit featured a meal with something out of his garden. The garden is neglected, now, as neither my father nor my grandmother has the energy to maintain it. Same with much of the other landscaping, although they have a fellow who comes to do what he can to keep up most of the yard. Even so, there are a couple of plants that are descended from things transplanted from where I-64 now goes by Covington Virginia (where we lived when I was in Kindergarten). My grandparents both had "green thumbs," and enjoyed having flowers, interesting shrubs, and that aforementioned garden in their yard. Sadly, I never learned how to keep such a yard so tidy and so green--my limited talents run more to making bicycles work reasonably well.

While in Williamsburg, I got to show Jenn some more of the surrounding sights. As you know, Williamsburg was the capitol of the Colony (and the Commonwealth) of Virginia for many years. It is but a short bike ride (shorter than my daily commute) from Jamestown (or James Towne, if you prefer), and not much farther from Yorktown. Jamestown was, as you know, the first permanent English settlement in North America, and the original capitol of the Colony. Yorktown was, of course, the site of the last battle of the Revolutionary War. A fair bit of early American history happened within a day's bike ride of my grandparents' house.

It's not all about history, though. One thing we did that was pretty entertaining was to take the ferry across the James River from Jamestown to Surrey. It's a fifteen- or twenty-minute ride from shore to shore. You can tell the locals--they stay in their cars most of the time. The tourists (and those locals entertaining tourists) often get out of their cars and feed the seagulls. The seagulls know this, and are willing to be entertaining in their efforts to catch pieces of bread or peanuts that are tossed aloft for their dining pleasure. It's a lot of fun to watch them flying in station-keeping mode waiting for food.

It's far too late to make a long post short, and I'll have to say more about the trip at a later time.


My bicycle miles total for the year 2011 stands at 8042. The "instead of driving" miles total stands at 7284.8. The commuting total stands at 5591, a hundred and fifty miles short of my total miles for 2010. That shortfall represents about six days of riding to work, and may suggest a goal for 2012: have the commuting miles for 2012 exceed my total miles for 2012.

Another goal that comes to mind is to simply ride instead of driving whenever I can, and see where the numbers go from there.