Our Backyard Freeway

One of my requirements in a home-- which we've been able to make work in all three of the homes we've had in Virginia-- is that the house backs to trees.  I grew up in the middle of the woods where I couldn't see a single home from any of our windows, so I like being able to see green and I like the privacy.  A home on a few acres would be my ideal, but until we strike it rich,I'm pretty happy as long as I have trees in my backyard and no houses looking directly into mine.

This house fit that requirement, but it also has a major freeway not too far behind us.  I'll let Google Maps give you the idea:




































I knew I-64 was there from the beginning-- I'd studied the map before I looked at it with our agent, so I was on the lookout to try and decide if it bothered me.  One of the things I noted when I first came was that you couldn't see the road, but you could definitely hear the trucks whooshing by.  And I was fine with that.  Our house is never particularly quiet, and in our old neighborhood there was always some sort of outside noise happening, whether it was someone running a chainsaw, or the water works plant letting off steam, or blasting at the quarry across town.  Also, there were always planes flying overhead on their way to Dulles.  So, yeah, I'm pretty used to white noise.

More worrisome was the view.  I figured as soon as the trees lost their leaves, we'd be looking at a big ugly freeway.  And I sort of dreaded that.  But since that freeway was probably one of the reasons that the house was in our price range at all (albeit barely), we went with it.  Besides, our house in Manassas had a really ugly lime green house that we could only see from November until April, so I figured this would be about like that.

So the bad news is that I was right, and we can clearly see the freeway from our house. 

But the good news is twofold: we ALSO have a view of the mountains!  Lovely, not very tall east coast mountains that still light up pink when the sun comes up and make my ears pop when we drive over them.  So yes, that means they're mountains.  (I'm convincing myself of this fact, not you.  It's taken me a long time to finally be willing to accept that anything on the east coast could be a mountain and not just a big hill.  But for lack of a better term, they've finally become mountains to me.)  I love getting to see mountains again.

The other good news is that I don't really mind looking at the road, either.  Something about the constant traffic fascinates me.  When I have to get up in the middle of the night for some reason, I like being able to look out and note that-- yep, even at this insane hour, someone is out driving.  It makes me feel like I'm not alone.  It makes me wonder who's out there and why.  It helps me remember just how many people there are in the world.

There are worse things than that to contemplate.