gullyfoyle

Hear is another repost from my old LiveJournal. Originally posted Dec. 3, 2006, this lament about the rapid development of rural areas on the outskirts of the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill-Cary metroplex remains painfully relevant. Sometimes I'll be driving through a new development in a place that I remember being mostly trees and open fields not that long ago, and I'll have a dissociative moment of disorientation that I think must be something like what Alzheimer's sufferer go through. This has happened a couple of times in the past few months. (Maybe I'm just developing Alzheimer's.) Generally I quite enjoy living in this area, but I have to say I sometimes think with yearning about retiring somewhere a bit more stable.

Over the river and through the woods?

[Dec. 3rd, 2006|10:57 pm]

[	Tags	\|	triangle	]
[	mood	\|	overdeveloped	]

Every December for the last six or seven years, we've piled into the station wagon and headed down highway 55, then turned right and wended our way through the woods and farms toward Jordan Lake Christmas Tree Farm . We usually go out that way only once a year, so it always took a bit of guesswork to follow the correct turns and roads. But we always made it there, enjoying the rural scenery along the way, even if we had to cast about a bit.

Today, we almost didn't make it. We took the correct road from 55 -- as subsequent Google Maps investigation showed -- but as we drove along, instead of the farms and forests we remembered, we kept seeing more and more houses and apartments. Big ones. Lots of them. The road started deteriorating, a sign of overuse by heavy trucks and construction vehicles. Then the road expanded out into a pristine, flawless parkway in the midst of an enormous open (mostly treeless) area filled with 1) big new houses, 2) big new houses under construction, or 3) numerous small lots onto which big new houses will shortly be constructed. The new multi-lane turnpike -- where's the old road? I kept thinking -- was bordered with signs for "THE LODGE at Amberly" or something like that--I forget, but not enough. We eventually came to a dead end and had to turn around, go back the way we came, and take a different, longer route to the Christmas tree farm. On the mailbox of one of the older houses we passed was a sign that said, simply, "Stop Cary."