Spring is Busting Out All Over

All the grass in Reston has all turned a brilliant emerald green. Virginia is stunning in the spring and fall, and Reston is not a bad place to be. Everything smells like plants, and since I crossed Reston National golf course (more on that later) on my home from work, grass was a dominant smell for me. There's also the smell of the conifers which generate new growth at this time as well as the lilacs which are blooming along with the dogwoods.

The bad spring thing is that for people with allergies, it's absolute hell here. The trees are dropping all their sticky yellow pollen right now (meaning this week). It gets all over the cars, and when we don't get rain, tries to drive people with allergies insane. We *have* had a lot of rain this week though, which probably contributed to the emerald greeness.

So, I walked across the golf course. This is the first time I've tried to find my way from the north to the south of the course. If you look at this map (look towards the bottom), you will notice that the course has three paths, each of which go to a different road. The problem here is that what you *don't* see is that the course is riddled with cart paths which happen to look identical to the paths on the map. This means that it's impossible to figure out where the one true three-way intersection (the one on the map) actually is. I should further explain that Reston is hilly and that there are a lot of trees. This decreases the sight lines to the roads to nil. This is a feature, not a bug, but it wasn't planned for navigational purposes, I can tell you that.

The long and short of this is that I went way out of my way -- actually in a complete circle adding about a mile to my walk home.

D'oh.