Day 22 and 23 – Virginia and North Carolina

Early in the morning we dropped Mark off at Dulles airport and headed down to North Carolina, through the state of Virginia. In Virginia, the first thing I noticed is that everyone actually drives 55, and the cops are watching. Also, the traffic on the interstate is horrible – it’s almost like everyone in DC takes off going south on the weekends, so Saturday morning at 9am, rush hour starts.

But it did get me thinking about the patterns of how people have settled over the country. Most of the biggest cities are in places where a traversable body of water meets land, and they all seem to have slightly different personalities. Meanwhile, people balance their desire to be in the midst of all the action (in the cities) and their desire to be with nature, in open spaces. The thing that struck me is that I’m probably experiencing the last of our current configuration of people. People have congregated in cities because they’ve needed to be near the jobs and the stores and the schools and the people they work with. Only some people have moved out into nature, and many have made these separate vacation homes or stayed within a reasonable commute to a nearby city. But with the advent of the Internet, more and more people can telecommute. In fact, on this trip, I learned that for the most part, had I been on my own, I could have run 75% of my business from the road. The only parts that would have been a problem are the in person meetings and speaking engagements, the networking events, and handling incoming “snail mail”. It makes me feel like I’m seeing the last of an era, and that humans will spread out over the world in a completely different pattern within the next few decades. It’s actually quite intriguing to me to imagine that I could at some point pick anywhere to live, as my home base, and it could be fairly remote as long as I could easily travel for in person work engagements. But that’s still a long way off. Because even though I’m enjoying this trip – regular travel is a completely different story. We’ll definitely stay in California for the next ten years or so.

My sister and her daughters live in North Carolina, so we spent two final days with them before beginning our long trek back to California. As usual, the cousins loved spending time together. We hung out at the pool, did laundry, grilled out and my sister and I got a couple of nights of good talking in as we caught up on each other’s lives. We joked about the journey back. They had seen a sign at Wilmington, North Carolina, on the I-40 that said something like 2700 miles to Barstow California. That’s one thing that’s going to make driving the southern route home easy. One freeway that you can catch a few minutes from my sister’s house in North Carolina, goes all the way to a small city a few hours from my house, in California. It’s going to be a long drive home - but at least it will be pretty hard to get lost. Here goes – the last big long week!