Live here and vacation there

Well, did you ever? I mean, honestly. In Money magazine’s latest listing of 100 best places to live, our area is totally missing, plus all other Virginia towns except Mechanicsville (54), Glen Allen (66) and Vienna (70). Vienna? That’s now a suburb of Tyson’s Corner, for goodness sake.
Maybe it validates Spotsylvania’s pullout from our regional tourist promotion effort. I thought it was pretty lame myself. (Slogan: Fredericksburg—Timeless.)Despite this poor ranking for Virginia’s towns, our whole state has been ranked #1 for business climate by CNBC. So there.

Still, it’s good to visit elsewhere to appreciate how we compare. So we did, my wife and I. But I must confess the trip was (besides being a nice visit to daughter, granddaughter and great granddaughter, etc.) a return to where we love to go anyway.

Colorado, although bursting at the seams with new suburbs and people, remains a great place, at least in the summer. You may recall that Carole Lee and I had tried to surprise our daughter at Christmas by flying into Denver and showing up on their doorstep. Instead, they got a huge blizzard and about four feet of snow. So we turned our canceled Christmas flight into a July 4 celebration, but minus the surprise element.

And, in contrast to all the recent horror stories about airlines and airport security hang-ups, our whole trip went smoothly. On the way there, our plane had many empty seats, maybe because its departure after 2 pm was when gurus warn travelers to avoid because of storm-caused delays.

Everything else went well also. Even the relatives behaved. Well, most of the time.

When visiting other places, I am attracted to some of the mundane roadside peculiarities. For instance, since most major streets in the Denver area are broad and straight, some sport 55 mph speed limits. A major toll road permits 70 mph, and you’ll see 75 mph signs on Interstate 25 south to Colorado Springs.

And winding west from Denver into the Rocky Mountains there’s Interstate 70, an engineering marvel. A roadside sign cautions: “Minimum 55 mph in left lane.” Yes, it said “minimum.”
Another novel sign seen shortly before a signaled intersection: “Photo Enforced.” With the red light cameras again being installed in Virginia, may we see such warnings here? We’ll see soon enough.

For our own signs deserve ridicule: “Pollution advisory. Use carpool, bus.” “Report suspicious activity.” “Drive to Survive.” Or how about “Leaving highway safety corridor” and “clickit or ticket.” Big Brother may be even worse in New Jersey, where they’re considering a law against a driver giving the finger.

Speaking of traffic, I rode on Denver’s new light rail system. Excellent. It features overhead electric power and something far more advanced than our own Metro. Upon entering a station you choose a one-way or round-trip ticket to your destination, then pay the specified amount into the machine. It belches out your ticket.

When you reach where you’re going, you just go. No ticket collector, no “add-fare” machine. Instead, a uniformed guy on some trains may have asked to see your ticket. If you free-loaded, you pay a fine. So far, free-loaders have averaged only 3 percent of the customers, it’s claimed. Great idea that our bureaucratic Washington Metro will surely ignore.

Around Denver’s suburbs, many concerns sound like ours. One is to make the electric power company bury planned lines rather than string them overhead. Out there they have a law preserving “protected mountain vistas.” The city, unlike here, has the power to enforce it on the power company.

Another feature out there isn’t so desirable. A golfer trying to hit his ball out of the rough on a suburban course got bit twice by a rattlesnake and went into anaphalectic shock, but survived.
Also in Denver, drivers are advised to change their cars’ gas-line filters every other year, while here at least three years is typical. Denver drivers have to use lots of smog-fighting gasoline mixtures that get cloggy.

Ah, but those mountains. Only an hour and a half west on I-70 and you’re up there high on the western slope, admiring the patches of snow still covering the high peaks and enjoying…shopping. We stopped in about the most picturesque little mountain town I know of—Frisco. There Carole Lee shopped as I breathed the thin air fragrant with pine.This time, though, the mountains were marred in places by dead trees decimated by the pine bark beetle. It looked as bad as those earlier gypsy moth ravages of our eastern hardwood forests, notably in Pennsylvania.

Even so, Colorado was certainly greener than here in Stafford, where a tired, crispy brown lawn greeted our return, along with a delighted Lollipop, our Yorkie.

Bucking Bronco now just trots

Although I’ve been put out to pasture, over the hill so to speak, I sometimes need to rare up on my hind legs. Like now, maybe once. For there are these burrs under my saddle. Or, as Jimmy Dean might say, I’ve been rode hard and put away wet.

So I’m chapped, ticked off, and just as grouchy as John McCain lately. Why? Let me count the ways.

* Immigration: A Representative from Tennessee complained on TV the other day, “We’re spending more on global warming than on border security.” That just about says it all apropos the intelligence of Congress today. They’re a bunch of nags.

* Horse Race: Speaking of nags, it’s no puzzle why Fred Thompson laps the declared GOP presidential field. He’s at least a hand or two taller, and as one pundit noted, “comfortable in his own skin.” To me he talks a lot like Reagan. We’ll see.

* A Swayback: A guy who might run on another track as an independent, NYC Mayor Bloomberg, is a nonstarter; scratch him. He’s dictated that all NYC cab drivers must convert to hybrid vehicles, costing them thousands of dollars, in the name of fighting global warming. May as well try to cool the sun for all the good that will do.

But green is so fashionable, don’t you see. Birds are dying because of urban sprawl and maybe even global warming, warns the National Audubon Society. An even bigger reason, demurs a piece in New Scientist magazine, might be the increasing cat population. But by all means we must be humane about it all. “For over 100 years, Audubon has worked to preserve bird and wildlife habitat. We know, however, that no environmental victory is permanent so long as population growth remains unchecked.”—Audubon Society Website. Granted, it doesn’t specify that it really means the cat population and not our own.

* The Local Slow Track: We laugh at congressional follies up in D.C. But a good example of local inertia is readily at hand. Seems Stafford’s Board of Supervisors decided as a procedural matter not to act on the proposed TND (traditional neighborhood development) ordinance right away, but to send it back to its planning commission for another vote. The commission had already approved it 5-2 earlier. So the commission took up that oat burner again, and slick as a whistle, again approved it 5-2 and sent it right back to the supervisors. Well, not quite. It took the planning commissioners more than four hours to reach the obvious conclusion, ending their session near midnight. What mudders. Giddy-up!

Still and all, our supervisors weren’t slow out of the gate at all recently in approving themselves a hike in pay. Correction: Only those who make up the next board in 2008 will get the added oats. Watch for testy election campaigns.

* Too many furlongs: One of these days, I’ll surely miss the joy of leisurely appreciating the treasures of historic Falmouth at length, at least the length of the backup traffic waiting for the Falmouth light to change. The quaint rows of cottages lining Cambridge Street south of Truslow Road, the peeling charm of Golgotha Church—Of course, as a knowledgeable Stafford resident you know that Cambridge Street there is actually U.S. 1, also known nearby as Jeff Davis Highway, and in Fredericksburg, the Bypass. We’re supposed to see an improvement for Falmouth traffic right soon, say just beyond six years, according to VDOT, which has never met a deadline it didn’t exceed.

* Hobby Horse: Scratch the Wall Street Journal. A favorite of mine for many years, the paper figures to get bought out by Rupert Murdoch’s glitzy, global media empire. Well. Many journalists consider that an unacceptable intrusion of his interests into a paper with a starchily independent editorial stance. The paper’s owners have sought assurances that he wouldn’t mess with its editorial independence.

Here’s Murdoch in a Time magazine interview: "They're taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control," Rupert Murdoch was saying into the phone, "in an industry in crisis! They can't sell their company and still control it — that's not how it works. I'm sorry!"

Here’s betting we’ll see changes there sooner than we will at the Falmouth light.

* Dark horse or Dobbin?: While Congress was diddling with immigration and energy—omitting in the latter bill any nod to offshore oil drilling or greater nuclear power while promoting clunky ethanol—others were getting serious.

Newt Gingrich has raised alarms and advocated preventive actions about the nuclear arms race and has proposed a workable plan on immigration. Way too specific to ever win election to a top office again, but Newt—unlike the candidates—offers substance, not horse manure. I’ve saved two excellent pieces by and about him. Let me know if you’d like to read them.