Drive

Limiting the amount of driving that you do is good for the environment. Alas, it is bad for your car battery. Here is the battery in question, after having been removed from my sadly de-energized car. 

Three cheers for the friendly AAA guys who came and fixed me up with a new battery. My car is a Mazda 5, almost fourteen years old. I’d like to keep it going for as long as possible.

The Triple A technicians explained how the few, short trips I have been taking per week are hard on my battery, especially in very cold weather. Well, phooey. Here I was, so proud of how little gas I was using. Now I guess I should take up a new career as a traveling salesman. 

If you have ever been through this experience then you’ll know that the next step after getting your new battery is driving your car around for about forty-five minutes. So I did. The problem was that I had no particular place to go. Any errands I might have wanted to run involved stopping the car to run in. That was a no-no.

So I decided to drive around Long Reach aimlessly until I found Jackson Pond. No GPS, no stopping to ask for directions. Hopefully no one reported me as a suspicious, unfamiliar vehicle as I noodled around from street to street. As per usual, no Jackson Pond. 

I drove through the Village Center and wondered how DoodleHatch is doing. I had a little twinge as I passed the new location of Little Caesar’s Pizza - - they used to be in Oakland Mills. I noticed the entrance to the Bauder Child Care Center and remembered what it was like to work with young children every day. 

I can’t explain why Long Reach fascinates me so much. I guess it is because it’s the first of the older Columbia Villages that I took an interest in aside from my own. There’s an interesting variety of housing styles and neighborhood arrangements. And there are some great examples of homes with a very retro feel. 

I looked down one road that seemed to go on quite a ways (no cul de sac) and decided to indulge my curiosity.

Well! There it was: Jackson Pond. I wanted to get out and taken a look around but I was on a mission to drive for forty-five minutes without stopping. So, on I went, feeling rather pleased with myself.

 

I decided to stay on Tamar and cross 175 to explore Jeffers Hill. I’ve never really continued on in that direction before. I was truly surprised by how much neighborhood is back there. I was puzzled by a road where houses appeared to be much more like new construction than what I had been seeing and so I turned off in that direction. It definitely looked less like “Old Columbia.” And then…

Sewell’s Orchard? I knew there was a pond in there - - somewhere - - but I had no idea that one could get into Sewell’s Orchard from Jeffers Hill. Why?  Probably because I had never looked at a map. Useful things, maps. My perception of Sewell’s Orchard was that it was approachable only from Oakland Mills Road. I felt head-smackingly stupid at this point. 

On the other hand, I had found another pond.

A few thoughts from my journey:

• Why haven’t they invented houses that don’t need to be power washed?
• Traditional architectural features reproduced on the cheap don’t necessary age well. 
• I wish I knew what it felt like to live in those neighborhoods when they were brand new.
• Geography and map skills were on the wane when I was in school and now I wish they hadn’t been.

Have you ever been tasked with driving forty-five minutes with no particular place to go? What did you do? Did you learn anything?

On the other hand, if you’d really like to be driving less and supporting public transportation instead, there’s a Transportation Open House tonight from 4:30 to 7:30 pm in Gateway. Try not to get lost. 

From Commute Howard: Please join us, other County departments & offices, state & local agencies, & our partners to learn more about the planning, design, operations, and maintenance of the County's transportation systems on Tuesday, January 30th from 4:30-7:30PM for our new Transportation Open House.

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