We’re in NoVa (the Northern Virginia region, for you out-of-towners). Not to be confused with NOvA, the physics experiment at Fermilab, which my son reminds me is spelled not with a v but with a nu, which I got wrong in my last post. I’m grateful this blog is a team effort, seriously. What do I know.
In any case, we’re near Manassas, which is not the kind of place you’d associate with camping. Miserable urban sprawl is more like it, with a unhealthy dose of traffic. But, this was as close as we could get to friends and appointments in Washington, D.C., so this expensive ($50/night) campground at Bull Run Park is where we be.
We absolutely dreaded it when we pulled in because, for some reason, we got a pull-through spot right off the campground road. Cars speed by, feet from our home, and people walk by and peer in the windows (not exactly, but it feels like that).
Plus the site is nothing but a clearing off the road that’s been roughly laid with giant gravel. We gave in and bought two more plastic rugs for the campsite so we don’t have to put on shoes each time we step outside.
The upside is that the gravel-strewn clearing is really big, which has suited us well during all this friend-visiting. With Virginia’s spring weather, it’s been chilly then warm then chilly, so having lots of space to move the furniture around and into the sunshine and to move the tent closer to the trailer (so we can put the propane firepit inside)—that’s all been super easy.
The trails are pretty danged nice, too.
Tracy spent one day in Washington, D.C., all day (he survived!) so Banjo and I stayed back and went hiking in the mud. We are definitely in NoVA: can you see the trucks on the highway in the background, below?
I could hear them non-stop, along with the glorious sound of construction equipment and emergency vehicles. At our campsite though, all we can hear is gunfire from the nearby shooting range. Lucky us!
A big benefit of being in “civilization” is that we’ve been able to go grocery shopping in person (thanks, vaccines) at good stores, like the Asian grocery we just spent hours in. It’s hard to pass by so many items we used to buy: stuff we had no idea what we’d cook with, but we’d stock the kitchen and find some way to cook with it once we got home. We don’t have enough room for that in our new mini kitchen, but we still managed to buy a ton of stuff anyway. Yay shrimp chips!
Better than shrimp chips though are the friends who have visited us here. Thanks for stopping by on your trip home, Mary! And thanks for the huge drive out to visit, Karen and Joel! See you soon. And we really enjoyed seeing you, George. Thank you for the beer! Better than shrimp chips!
I love mooching around those big Asian supermarkets, so many new and interesting things as well as stuff I have no idea what it is even. Funny to see a Maggi packet in the header photo. It wasn’t a brand I was familiar with until I moved down here so just assumed it was a local brand. I only discovered fairly recently that’s it’s a huge and very popular worldwide brand!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!