The road or the lawn mower.....hmmmmm

Friday we settled in at VA BBQ for the weekly cruise managed by Fredericksburg Classic and Muscle Car Club.  A lot of the usual suspects rolled in along with a few new rides too.  The deep wine ’39 Chevy was perfect….it didn’t stand out till you started checking it closely.  So much attention to detail, it was just amazing.  And the orange ’37 Ford that I walked by thinking it was Special Ed’s orange ’39….they look similar with a quick glance.  I have to talk to the owner next time!  There were about 45 cars at the cruise….a nice night.  Our little cluster of friends kept talking through the awards, the 50/50 and almost all the cars leaving before we noticed we were nearly the last ones in the lot!  The weather was perfect, the company was engaging….they say ‘time fly’s when you are having fun’.  I can’t think of a more pleasant way to spend a few hours with friends and hot rods.  The Princess & I cruised home remarking what a cool hobby this is….

Saturday we launched from Stafford, VA on our 67 mile cruise to Gordonsville, VA and the Barbeque Exchange Restaurant.  Ever since our friend Bill told us about this place, we try to visit it as often as we can.   Denny & Betty left the WAWA with us and Dan & Ramona joined in on the way out of Stafford.  When we cruised past Culpeper, Fred & Debie joined with us in our quest for food.  This is always a lazy, non confrontational cruise through the rolling hills of the Virginia Countryside.  The Princess takes pictures along the way to try to give you a flavor of its grandeur….but you need to go with us sometime to absorb the full impact of what God has put here for us to enjoy. 

Cruising along is fun….until….we reach Gordonsville….and the circle of death.  In order to proceed through Gordonsville VDOT decided to install a traffic circle, or round-about!  I think these medieval devices are just a clever way for the government to subliminally train us to be more aggressive drivers.  One has only two choices once you get to the queue of the circle of death.  You can wait till someone in the whirling dervish of vehicles lets you enter the fray….but most of the time your driver’s license will expire before that happens.  Or….you can just aggressively push into the melee and hope you hit something smaller than you as you merge with the crush of metal mayhem.  Once in the swirl you have to keep uncomfortably close to the person in front of you lest any other driver dare merge in front of you.  All the while you have to keep track of where your exit is located so you can jump off the mind numbing marry-go-round without getting trapped.  This part of the exercise is very important because if you wimp out you will be sentenced to a life of driving around in circles.  This is when I usually think about that old Kingston Trio song….the one about the MTA.

So we all make it through the circle of death and into Gordonsville proper.  It’s a quaint old town with architecture from the 1800’s.  Its name came from the original postmaster, Nathaniel Gordon, who purchased the land in 1787 from a cousin of President James Madison.  He opened the post office in 1813 and the town’s name was changed from ‘Newville’ to Gordonsville at that time.  Gordonsville is also a hub of three major highways and has a railroad running through it too.  It was and is an important crossroad town for commerce as well as travelers.