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18 minute read

September 10, 2024, 3:36 PM

Recently, Elyse and I, along with our friend Kyle, made a trip to Charleston, South Carolina on something of a bus adventure.

However, before I get into the actual story, I have some updates for you, since it’s been a while since anything was discussed about the bus situation.  Remember back in October, when Elyse, Montigue, and I went down to Charleston in the HR-V in order to pick up former CARTA bus 3426, a 1996 New Flyer D35HF, which we were then going to swap with Trevor Logan for an Orion V?  Since then, things have changed quite a bit.  First, the New Flyer needed a lot of work in order to be healthy, including a new transmission, which was more than Trevor was willing to commit to, and so he ultimately discontinued his efforts in restoring the bus.  That made all of us sad, because we all wanted to see that bus restored and preserved, and didn’t want to see such a unique model go to scrap.  Additionally, at the same time, I was having problems getting insurance for the Orion V, which was former Westchester County Bee-Line bus 700.  That was a 2006 model, which was too recent to qualify for historic vehicle insurance (i.e. Hagerty), plus most of the other insurance companies balked at giving me insurance because of the two recent accidents that I was involved in with the old HR-V and with the new HR-V.  I really resented that, because in both of those cases, I was ruled to not be at fault, i.e. I am a very safe driver, but they were holding it against me anyway, like it’s my fault that some idiot in a Nissan Pathfinder ran a red light at high speed and plowed into me.  In any event, that problem with insurance caused delays in my taking possession of the bus, since I really couldn’t do anything with it until I was able to get it insured.  So that’s where things stood for a while.

Then in April, when Elyse and I made our pleasure trip to Charleston, recall that the first thing that we did upon arrival in the Charleston area was to check up on 3426 at General Diesel‘s facility.  We were pleased to see that it was still there, and at that time, I remarked, “The estimates have come back in, and while everything wrong with it can be fixed, it’s going to cost a big chunk of change to do.  Whether that happens, however, is not up to me.  But we at least wanted to say hello.”  That was the end of our bus involvement for that trip, because other than Elyse’s riding around on various CARTA routes, there were no bus activities planned.  But that visit set off a light bulb in my head.  I knew roughly how much it would cost to repair 3426.  I also knew that I could afford to have those repairs made.  Because of all of the hassle with insurance and whatnot regarding the Orion V, I had also soured a bit on that bus, since I was facing roadblocks to even get into the game.  By comparison, insurance for an historic vehicle would have been a snap.  To qualify as historic requires that the vehicle be 25 or more model years old, and a 2006 Orion V wouldn’t hit that threshold until 2031, which, for our planning purposes, might as well be forever.  So the idea was, why don’t we undo our trade, and let Trevor keep the Orion V, which was former Bee-Line 700, and I would take over former CARTA 3426?

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Categories: CFW, New Flyer D35HF, North Carolina, South Carolina, Travel

28 minute read

May 9, 2024, 10:14 AM

From April 17-19, Elyse and I made a weekend trip down to Charleston, South Carolina.  It’s funny how this worked out.  After our visit to Charleston last October, we both were left wanting more.  We saw lots of potential in Charleston, and wanted to go back, but we weren’t sure whether we wanted to drive back again, vs. flying.  Charleston is eight hours away, which is quite a long haul, and it’s almost entirely through rural areas once you get out of the DC region.  In other words, not very exciting.  But then when we looked at airfare, we realized that it was really expensive, and that with all of the goings-on at the airport plus multiple flights, we wouldn’t save any time compared to driving, plus we would be limited as to what we could bring with us, and would probably need to rent a car down there.  All of that said, that pushed me into driving territory, because then we could bring whatever we wanted, go on our own schedule, and have fun on the way down and back.  Plus then we would have the HR-V in Charleston.

On the southbound leg, I tried to keep the trip as close to all-business as I could.  I only planned on making four stops: one in the Richmond area, one in Skippers, Virginia (the last Virginia exit on I-95), one somewhere in North Carolina, and then one at the Buc-ee’s in Florence, South Carolina.  That would get us to Charleston at a somewhat reasonable hour as long as we kept to it.

Richmond was intended primarily as a food stop.  My original idea was to stop at the Sheetz at the Atlee exit, and do Sheetz, and I pitched that to Elyse a few days prior to our trip.  It’s funny – when I pitched the idea, Elyse’s response was something to the effect of, “When were you going to tell me about this?” and my response was simply, “What does this look like?”  Elyse said that she didn’t want to do Sheetz, because we always do Sheetz, and then suggested we find a barbecue place.  I was like, “You had me at barbecue.”  Looking it up, I found two places that weren’t too far off of I-95.  One was a place called Q Barbeque up in Glen Allen, and then the other one was Oak & Apple right in downtown.  I chose Oak & Apple, because it was right in downtown Richmond, and closer to the freeway.  More or less get off of the exit, go like two blocks, and boom, there it is.

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Categories: Converted buildings, Fire alarms, Netculture, New Flyer D35HF, North Carolina, Photography, Retail, Roads, Ships, South Carolina, Transit, Travel

22 minute read

October 27, 2023, 10:02 AM

Recently, a friend of mine posted some computer generated images from the Bing Image Creator, which uses the DALL-E system as its base.  I enjoyed their posts, so I decided to take it for a spin myself with subjects that were more relevant to me.  My first idea was to have it generate me.  The way I saw it, ChatGPT kinda sorta knew who I was, so it seemed reasonable to see if Bing Image Creator could perform similarly.

The first prompt that I gave it was “Ben Schumin in Washington, DC” and this is what it produced:

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Categories: Afton Mountain, Artificial intelligence, Baltimore, Fire alarms, Honda HR-V (2018), JMU, Kia Soul, Mercury Sable, Stuarts Draft, Today's Special, Toyota Previa, Washington DC, WMATA

18 minute read

October 13, 2023, 5:51 PM

First of all, I have some news for you: I bought a bus.  Elyse had been trying to talk me into buying a bus for a while, and I had consistently said no.  But then one came up on GovDeals, which is a website where public agencies sell surplus property, that had promise, and I said okay.  This unit was a New Flyer D35HF from CARTA, which is the transit agency serving Charleston, South Carolina.  If this sounds familiar, “Biscuit” at Commonwealth Coach is another unit from the same agency, and is the same model of bus.  I won the auction for a surprisingly low amount, as we paid nearly twice as much to get “Biscuit” for Commonwealth Coach.  We then immediately made a deal with Trevor Logan, a fellow transit enthusiast in the DC area who runs the TTMG website, to trade this bus for an Orion V that he owns after he expressed his thoughts about the significance of the unit.  It worked out quite well, because while Elyse and I simply wanted a bus to have as a fun vehicle of sorts to take places and show off, Trevor wanted to fully restore and preserve the bus for sentimental reasons, as he had a close relative who worked for CARTA some years ago, and that relative had operated this specific unit.  So swapping made everyone happy, as Elyse and I would get a bus to have fun with, and Trevor got something of great personal significance that he would restore.

With that said, buying a bus from a transit agency in South Carolina meant going down to South Carolina to retrieve it, because these auctions are typically as-is-where-is, i.e. the agency provides little to no assistance with the removal of the item.  I wanted to line up this pickup trip with a three-day weekend that I had later in the month, but unfortunately, with deadlines for removal and such, it couldn’t wait.  So I would spend October 5-6 traveling down to Charleston and back with Elyse and our friend Montigue to retrieve this vintage bus.  The whole week prior to our heading down, I was saying to myself, “I can’t believe that I’m going to South Carolina.”  Then on the way down, I was like, “I can’t believe that we’re on our way to South Carolina.”  And then once we were there, I was saying, “I can’t believe that we’re in South Carolina.”  Seriously.  This was not something that I had anticipated doing this year.

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Categories: New Flyer D35HF, South Carolina, Transit, Travel

11 minute read

September 29, 2023, 11:20 PM

Apparently, I just have rotten luck when it comes to cars, as the new HR-V has already made its first visit to the body shop.  Back in July, Elyse and I got rear-ended on the GW Parkway on the way home from work.  We were in a work zone, and I had to stop short after someone stopped short in front of me.  I was successful in not hitting the guy in front of me, because I was maintaining a good following distance, but then the guy behind me wasn’t so fortunate, and plowed into the back of the HR-V.  That was a big jolt.  The car, meanwhile, was on top of things, as it popped up a message on the screen saying something like, “Hey, I think we got hit.  Want me to call 911 for you?”  Turned out, though, that 911, after playing hot potato with me (the accident happened in Virginia, but my phone connected me to Montgomery County, who transferred me to Fairfax County, who then transferred me to US Park Police), wouldn’t send anyone out since there were no injuries and both cars were still drivable.  So we just exchanged information and kept it moving.  Here’s what the damage to my car looked like:

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Categories: Honda HR-V (2023)

13 minute read

June 29, 2023, 8:44 AM

From June 21-23, Elyse and I made a weekend trip to Virginia, but instead of centering on Staunton like we usually do, we centered on Roanoke (but don’t worry – we still saw my parents in Stuarts Draft).  We had planned this trip largely as a photography outing, and then the weather didn’t cooperate.  It was raining continuously almost the entire time, which made for a more difficult drive than I would have liked, but the trip was worth it.  I guess that you could say that while we didn’t necessarily do much in the way as far as photography, we laid the groundwork for future trips by identifying potential subjects.  I didn’t want to lay groundwork for the future this time around, as I really wanted to bring home the goods, but such is what happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate.  I brought my DSLR and my drone on this trip, but neither one of them ever left their respective carrier.

The plan was to drive down from the DC area to Lynchburg via US 29, spend the afternoon and early evening of the first day in Lynchburg, and then head over to Roanoke, where we were staying at the Hampton Inn located downtown (the one built on top of a city parking garage).  Then we would spend the entire second day in Roanoke, largely with Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, which is a bus museum that Elyse and I both serve on the board of.  Then on the last day, we would head up to Staunton and Waynesboro, where I had some things that I wanted to get over there, before going over to see my parents.  What ended up happening was pretty similar to plan, but not quite.  Our departure was delayed, because we already knew that much of the day would be a rainout.  The drive down to Charlottesville was fine, making one stop for food at the third (Bealeton) Sheetz.  We made a brief stop at Barracks Road in Charlottesville, and then we were back on the road.  It started raining harder once we cleared Charlottesville, and we saw three different accidents between Charlottesville and Amherst where people had clearly wiped out after driving faster than conditions allowed.  One of those accidents was a police car, which was clearly totaled in its accident.  We took it slowly, especially since I didn’t have that much experience taking the new HR-V in driving rain like this before, plus I wasn’t as familiar with the stretch of 29 from Charlottesville to Lynchburg (particularly from I-64 to VA 151) as I am with 29 north of Charlottesville.

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Categories: Friends, Honda HR-V (2023), Lynchburg, Roanoke, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Transit, Travel

32 minute read

April 26, 2023, 8:33 PM

From April 12-14, Elyse and I took a little weekend trip to New York City.  This was the new HR-V’s first road trip, and what better place to go to than New York, I suppose.  It was definitely a different experience than the Soul’s first road trip, which was the trip home from Staunton the day after I bought it, as well as the original HR-V’s first road trip, which was a day trip to Philadelphia.

With this trip, I was looking forward to seeing how the new HR-V did on a long trip with the various smart features that it has built into it, such as the adaptive cruise control and the lane watch system.  I had tested these things on my commutes to and from work on various occasions on a somewhat limited basis, but I hadn’t done a long drive with them yet.  The good news was that these systems worked quite well together on our trip, which we took largely via I-95 and the New Jersey Turnpike.  I think that this was probably the least stressful drive on I-95 that I’ve ever had, as the cruise control maintained a safe distance from the cars ahead of me, and it maintained my lane quite well, following the various curves in the road.  That put me, as the driver, in something of a more “strategic” role, as I was responsible for navigating and making lane changes and such, as well as watching out for any hazards, but the car largely drove itself.  I wouldn’t use these systems on city streets, but for a road trip on freeways, it was great.  The thing to remember, though, is that these are driver assist features.  This is not self-driving, and should not be confused with that.  This does not absolve the driver from the responsibility of driving at the proper speed for conditions, and it also does not mean that you can kick back and play on your phone behind the wheel.  Not at all – you’re still very much in charge, even if this does automate certain parts of it.

The trip up was fairly uneventful.  We had to detour onto Route 1 from White Marsh to Joppa in order to avoid a backup, and there was a construction project on the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which had a direct connection to the Turnpike that crossed us over to the southbound span.  Additionally, Maryland House, one of the two full-service travel plazas on I-95 in Maryland, was closed for emergency plumbing repairs.  And then, of course, when driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, the speed limit signs are merely suggestions.  Just keep up with traffic, and you will be fine.  And if traffic is going 20 over the speed limit in a work zone, you’re going 20 over in a work zone, too.  Otherwise, you become a hazard to traffic.  Then upon arrival in the New York area, we got on I-278, where we followed roughly the same route that we did in our impromptu 2017 trip to New York, but in reverse.  We parked on the street in front of our hotel, the Aloft, got checked in and brought all of our stuff up, and then I took the HR-V to its own hotel, which was on the next block over.

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Categories: Driving, Family, Honda HR-V (2023), New York City, New York Subway, Photography, Travel

15 minute read

April 7, 2023, 10:00 AM

Recently, I was finally able to complete the last little bits of business related to the car accident from last October, and put it all behind me.  On Thursday, March 30, I made the 175-mile journey to Stuarts Draft in the Scion – a trip that would leave it back home with my parents, where it belongs.  And while I was at it, I made a weekend trip out of it, coupling it with a day in Richmond, where I did some photography.  As such, I would traverse what I like to call Virginia’s “Interstate square”.  If you look at a map of Virginia, the various Interstate highways in the state form something like a lopsided square, consisting of I-66 to the north, I-81 to the west, I-64 to the south, and I-95 to the east, and Strasburg, the DC area, Richmond, and Staunton at the corners:

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Categories: Driving, Family, Harrisonburg, Howard Johnson's, JMU, Photography, Richmond, Roads, Scion xB, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Travel

10 minute read

March 24, 2023, 6:33 PM

All I have to say is, thank goodness.  Five and a half months after my original Honda HR-V was totaled in an accident, and on the 27th anniversary of this website’s founding, I am at last back in an HR-V.  It was a much longer journey than anyone expected, but we got there.  The thing about buying a new car right now is that because of a semiconductor shortage, the demand for cars far outstrips the supply, and most new cars are already spoken for before they’re even manufactured.  As such, right now, you can’t just buy a new car off of the lot and then drive it home.  Rather, you’ve got to get into the queue, and your car will be built and delivered in a few months’ time.

The biggest take-home for me in the whole process was learning a lot about how cars get to dealerships.  Going into this, I thought that the customer ordered the car that they wanted, the dealership placed that order with the manufacturer, and then the manufacturer would build it and ship it to the dealership, where the customer would be waiting.  Turns out that’s not how it works.  How it actually works is that the manufacturer makes whatever they want, and then they allocate a certain number of cars to each dealership.  Then the dealerships either sell those cars themselves, or trade them amongst each other to meet customer needs.  I suspect that my lack of understanding of how this worked led to some delay, as I inadvertently sent my contact at Shockley Honda on a wild goose chase with a very specific request that made it harder to get me a car.

But before I got to that point, I had to make sure that another HR-V was what I wanted for my next car.  That wasn’t as straightforward as one might think, because Honda had redesigned the HR-V for 2023.  Therefore, it wouldn’t be the same HR-V as I had just lost.  The HR-V had gotten a platform change, now sharing a platform with the Civic rather than the Fit.  It was also a bigger vehicle than it used to be.  On October 10, a day or so after the accident, after getting my new glasses and speaking with many different people from the insurance company, I was heading home after dropping Elyse off with a friend for a little while.  My route took me past Herson’s Honda in Rockville, and I glanced over at the lot to see what they had.  To my surprise, there was a 2023 HR-V sitting on their lot.  Time to act: I busted a move across a couple of lanes of traffic to get in there to see about taking that HR-V for a test drive.  I talked to the salesman, and he showed me everything on it, and we took it for a spin around Rockville, over various kinds of roads so that I could get a good feel for how it handled.  It all felt very familiar.  In other words, while it may have looked different and it had a lot of fancy new features, it was still an HR-V under all of that.  Then the next day, I took Elyse with me to the dealership and we gave it another test drive.  Funny thing was that neither the second salesman nor Elyse noticed that I never set the mirrors, the seat, or anything when I got into it.  I just jumped in and we were off, because it was all still set for me from the day before.  That second test drive validated my findings from the first drive, and I also asked a few questions that I had forgotten to ask the day before.  So it was settled: my next car would be another HR-V.  And in what felt like a surprising move, I went with the EX-L trim, i.e. the top-tier version.  Reason was that on the 2023 models, EX-L was the only trim that had a moon roof.  The sport trim didn’t have a moon roof anymore.

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Categories: Frederick, Honda HR-V (2023)

7 minute read

January 27, 2023, 9:08 AM

On Thursday, January 26, Elyse, my friend Matthew, and I went to the Washington Auto Show at the Washington Convention Center.  This was Matthew’s first time ever going to the auto show, and the first time that Elyse and I had been since 2020.  Overall, I was less than impressed this time around, but I am not entirely willing to ding the entities involved with putting on the show for it, as I suspect that the ongoing semiconductor shortage is likely to blame for the weak showing at the auto show.  This is the same reason that my new HR-V is taking so long.  And I get it: if they can’t get cars out to paying customers in a reasonable time, it’s hard to justify pulling units out of circulation for demo purposes.  Because of this, the event space was a lot smaller than it usually is, with large sections of the upper and lower event halls’ being sectioned off with curtains.  I got the distinct feeling when I came in that the space was smaller, and it turned out that my feeling was right.  On the plus side, though, one of my big peeves about the auto show in past years was gone, as we didn’t have to wend our way through the convention center’s lobby through a gauntlet of sponsors hawking their products and services that have absolutely nothing to do with cars before getting to the show floor.  All that gauntlet of sponsors ever managed to do was piss me off before I ever got started.  So good riddance to them, and hopefully they don’t come back in future years.  This year, we just came in and went right into the event.

This year, I wanted to go to the auto show in order to check out electric cars.  Recalling my day test driving electric cars in Frederick last spring, I wanted to see what the various manufacturers’ offerings were like.  I still am in the market for an electric car in addition to the HR-V, but following my October 2022 accident in the original HR-V, this has been put on hold for a while.  Following my visit to the auto show, I still got the sense, as was the case last spring, that the electric vehicle market has not yet “arrived”.  Automakers are still going for overly futuristic designs for their electric models to showcase that they’re something different, and a lot of brands still don’t have an entry in the electric market as of yet.  I have said before that I will know that the electric vehicle market has “arrived” when automakers start rolling out electric vehicles with conventional design.  For instance, I’ll know that it’s “arrived” when Honda starts making an electric version of the CR-V that is otherwise exactly the same design as the regular CR-V.  In other words, it’s first and foremost a CR-V, and it just happens to be electric.  Not this whole, “Woooooooo, look at me, I’m electric!” kind of style that we’re seeing now.

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Categories: Honda HR-V (2023), Matthew, Washington DC, WMATA

23 minute read

January 21, 2023, 10:17 AM

On January 5 and 6, while Elyse was at National Harbor attending MAGFest, I did a little overnight trip up north while I was unsupervised.  This was to be a quick adventure, since this wasn’t one of my long weekends, and the goal was to pack as much fun as I could have into two days’ time.  The plan was to leave home in the late morning on the 5th, go up to Philadelphia that day and stay at the Courtyard by Marriott in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, which would stage me for the second day, where I would head over to Trenton and then take the train up to New York.  I would spend about eight hours in New York, ride the train back to Trenton, and then head home from there.  Interestingly enough, this was an adventure where I put more focus on the logistics of the travel than I did on what I would actually do at the destination.  Thus, the execution didn’t go as well as I had intended, as I ended up getting there and then was like, well, now what? as I more or less played it by ear with less direction than I usually like to give myself.  I also knew that this would need to be a more indoor-focused trip, because it was going to be rainy or overcast all day both days.  This adventure was also unusual because on this adventure, the drone stayed home.  The Philadelphia day was not going to be conducive for flying, and New York, forget about it – too many people to worry about.

For the “Philadelphia” day, I actually put more of my efforts into the Wilmington area than I did in Philadelphia.  I have a list of photo shoot ideas on the computer, which I jokingly refer to as “the place where photo ideas go to die”, and initially pulled out the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, which a photographer friend had previously photographed.  However, I wanted to do the interior, and they also closed at 5 PM, so that would have to be a first stop since it closed relatively early.  So while I wanted to do it, I put it into the “we’ll see” pile, because I wanted to do some stuff in Delaware, which would have to come first because of its location.  I ended up spending a lot of time at Christiana Mall, since I’d been going past it on 95 in 15+ years of adventures up north, but I’d never stopped there in all of that time.

When it came to Christiana Mall, I sort of knew what to expect.  Christiana Mall was a one-story mall, and, unlike a lot of malls these days, was doing well.  As such, I didn’t go in expecting something massive like King of Prussia and then experience disappointment when I got a one-story mall.  Even for a one-story mall, the facility was smaller than I expected, being arranged roughly in a loop.  It had five anchor spots, and they were all filled.  I think that the biggest surprise there was the way that Target was attached to the mall.  In most cases where I’ve seen Target at an enclosed shopping mall, the store is either adjoining the mall but otherwise freestanding (i.e. no mall entrance), or the mall entrance is located at the front of the store near the regular exterior entrance.  Not so at this store.  At Christiana, the mall entrance for Target was in the back of the store.  From the perspective of the store, there was a row of self checkout machines in the random location in the back of the store, and there was a mall entrance nearby.  If it tells you anything about how random the mall entrance’s location is, after I finished up at Target, I had to hunt for that mall entrance in order to get back to the mall.  It is very non-obvious in its placement.

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Categories: Delaware, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, Scion xB, Travel

6 minute read

January 12, 2023, 9:22 AM

One thing that I did not expect to come from the accident that claimed my HR-V was how much it has really bothered me, more than three months down the road.  When I had the fire in the Soul, by the time three months had passed, I was in the HR-V and going along being awesome.  The HR-V would take its first big road trip, an overnight trip to Centralia, Pennsylvania, a little more than three months after the Soul’s demise.  In other words, I got over it quickly.  I suppose it’s because the Soul perished in a fire, and it happened without any direct human intervention, i.e. no human’s actions directly triggered the failure that led to the fire, even though the root cause was shoddy workmanship during the warranty replacement of the engine.

In the case of the HR-V’s demise, the root cause was traceable to one person: Jose Rosalio Abrego Mena.  He failed to stop for a red signal, and despite my best efforts to avoid a collision, there just wasn’t enough room to stop to avoid a collision, and his Nissan Pathfinder struck my HR-V on the left side, roughly on the A-pillar.  I came out of it pretty well despite everything, walking away from the accident with only minor injuries.  However, I feel like it may have left some lasting mental effects on me.  I still get a little jumpy when I see the headlights of a vehicle approaching from a cross street at night, though this has reduced somewhat with time.  I also can’t seem to get the whole incident out of my head, as my time in the train, which often helps me to organize my thoughts, has been a place to dwell on the accident, even though I played no part in causing it.  I keep thinking about how I got knocked out by the airbags.  I keep thinking about how the other driver ran after the accident, and how no charges that I could find were ever filed against the other driver (though I did turn up some old charges for trespassing and fishing without a license).  I think about if there was anything more that I could have done to avoid a collision, such as a hard turn of the wheel, though I admit that once the other driver ran the light, a collision was probably inevitable (but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it).  The accident also made me consider my own mortality, as I think about how easily this collision could have killed me right then and there, and how lucky I was to be able to walk away from it largely unscathed.  In short, I have not gotten over this one by any means, and I desperately wish that I could, but I just can’t seem to stop thinking about it and put it behind me.  I hope that I didn’t end up with a case of PTSD over this, but I’m worried that I might.

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Categories: Gaithersburg, Honda HR-V (2018)

5 minute read

December 21, 2022, 5:24 PM

There are times when I wish that I was not as well-versed in what happens to a car after a total loss, but after losing my old Kia Soul in a fire in February 2018, and then losing the HR-V in October, here we are.  I am experienced in losing cars through no fault of my own, though I admit that it does make the process a bit easier for everyone when the client is already familiar with the process.  In this case, I knew that eventually, my car would end up on an auto auction site, just like the Soul did.  And today, after searching the HR-V’s VIN in Google, I finally turned it up.  So here is what will probably be the last group of photos that we will ever see of my HR-V, from IAAI:

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Categories: Honda HR-V (2018), New car

5 minute read

December 21, 2022, 10:54 AM

You may remember that in my last Staunton Mall update, I said, speaking of the mall as it might appear in December, “I would not be surprised if the demolition was complete by then, and we’re looking at an empty slab plus Belk at that time.  I suppose that we’ll all find out together whether I’m right or not.”  Now that the December trip down that way is over with, I can say that I was not correct.  The demolition has certainly progressed, but as of December 16, the work is still by no means complete, though there is now more rubble than there is intact structure.

For this update, I once again did a flyover of the mall with the drone to get both overview and detailed shots of the former Staunton Mall.  I started with the overview:

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Categories: Augusta County, Scion xB, Staunton, Staunton Mall

5 minute read

November 3, 2022, 8:09 AM

On October 26, Elyse and I took a one-day trip down to Augusta County in order to change to the “permanent temporary solution” for my car problem, i.e. Mom’s Scion xB, following the HR-V’s untimely demise in an accident two and a half weeks prior.  I don’t necessarily like doing these sorts of trips in a single day because it’s a lot of driving and I’m not 25 anymore, but that’s all I had time for based on my schedule.  I also couldn’t really postpone this trip, because things were going to get a bit more expensive for me if I didn’t do this trip when I did.  For those not familiar, when you have Progressive for your insurance and your car is totaled, your rental coverage ends three days after you are notified of your car’s total loss.  That notification occurred while Elyse and I were on a weeklong trip to Tennessee, and so Progressive, taking my length of time as a customer (18 years!) into consideration, they extended my coverage until the day after we got back from our trip.  Then Enterprise Rent-A-Car would let me pay the insurance rate for my rental for another week beyond that, after which I would have to pay the (much higher) retail rate.  My original plan was to switch cars on the way back home, returning the rental car in Staunton, and then doing the last leg of the return trip in Mom’s car.  As the trip continued on, though, I soon realized that we would be cutting it far too close with that plan, considering that it was also our Roanoke day, so I opted to postpone the car swap by a week and do the visit with my parents on the way home as we had planned to do it prior to the accident, i.e. it would just be a visit.  So the primary focus of this trip was just to swap cars, on the day that the retail rate would have gone into effect, i.e. if you don’t return this car right now, you will be paying a lot more for it going forward.  The addition of this new trip down also changed the plans for the last day of the Tennessee trip.  Since there would now be an extra trip down to Staunton, I skipped a Staunton Mall update that I had planned for the return trip to save time, since I would be going right there the following week.

For this particular Staunton Mall visit, noting the pace of the progress that I had observed in June, August, and September, I already had a decent idea about what to expect.  I figured that by my next visit, the remainder of the mall’s interior would be gone, and they would probably then start working on demolishing the exterior walls, which had remained mostly intact up to this point, which meant that Staunton Mall still largely looked like Staunton Mall from the road during most of the demolition up to that point.  I also knew that I didn’t have much time on site this time around, and that the demolition crew would more than likely be on the property.  Therefore, this was to be a high-level visit solely by drone, flown from well above the property where I could see my vehicle around the entire mall without having to reposition myself, and staying well clear of the demolition crew, since I didn’t want to get in their way at all, and I also didn’t have any time to discuss any special access with them, as I did in September to photograph what remained of the mall’s interior.  All of that said, I made a quick ten-minute flight where I flew from the Orchard Hill Square shopping center across the street, and made a pass across the front of the mall, looped around the entire property, and then dipped down near the Belk entrance where there were no workers present for a momentary peek at that area before returning to the launch site.

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Categories: Augusta County, Scion xB, Staunton, Staunton Mall