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The best moments in travel just happen to be the most random ones. Stuff done on the fly, off of a dare, in the moment, often with family. This is one of my favorite memories, not because of the complexity of it, or how much it cost, or even the bragging rights of anything, it’s on my favorites list primarily because of its simplicity and that it happened with family. This is the short story of venturing across the border from Virginia into North Carolina just because 4 cousins in a car all at the same time decided: “Hey, let’s go to North Carolina!”
It was a hot and humid, yet stunningly beautiful, summer day in South Boston, Virginia. For those that don’t know, Virginia also has a South Boston which is just outside of Halifax, Virginia in Halifax County. Now, Halifax is located on the southern border of the state, just a stone’s throw from the North Carolina border almost due north from Durham and Raleigh. South Boston, around those parts, is properly pronounced “Sewth Boston” if ya didn’t know!
It was a Saturday in July and the morning had been full of family adventures. Having driven down from Charlottesville with my cousin, we met our 2 other cousins who had driven all the way from Manassas to spend the weekend with us. That Saturday morning was spent visiting our ancestors in the Halifax area – we were all in a state of familial reverence with a sense of timeless connectivity as cousins of the same ancestral line.
I had mentioned what an arduous drive down from Charlottesville, or “C-Ville” as it’s known locally, we had had because we relied way too much on Google Maps to get us to our destination when in mid sentence I was immediately rebuffed with a series of directions that our older cousins had related to us the evening prior. To be honest, it didn’t sink in at the time! This was my first trip to Virginia and all the roads and highways all seemed like mazes. By the time Google had almost made a mess of our drive, we finally realized the wisdom of our Virginia native cousins!
I might have been distracted and way to enamored at how they pronounced ‘road’ as [rewd] and ‘out’ as [oat] to be paying actual attention to the directions they were telling me. Sorry, it’s just the linguist in me but that Virginia accent is just too cool!
After our morning adventure we headed out to the South Boston-Halifax County Museum, aka, the SBHCM. What a cool place that was! It had a very detailed history of the Halifax area including a massive pictorial timeline of all of the major people and events which snaked around the interior of this huge display which, in all honesty, seemed larger than the town itself. It’s a must-see!
The museum also featured a nifty bookstore, from which I purchased 2 books! There were 2 local histories that could be purchased nowhere else. Go #booknerd. There was also a cool train replica just outside the museum doors, presumably as a roadside attraction to lure in visitors. Hey, it’s a train that you can actually walk around in, how cool is that?!?
Okay, back to the main story. It was getting late and fomenting under our energies was this latent desire to make the most of our trip; well, especially for me and my other cousin who were ‘virgin Virginians.’ Our ancestors had come from there but we had never been there before – Virginia is in our blood.
Some of our ancestors also came from North Carolina and since we were only about 15 miles from the border we decided “Hey, let’s go to North Carolina!” So off we drove with the singular intention of crossing the border into our southerly sisterly state, take a picture of the sign, and then head back to Virginia soil!
We were all laughing and carrying on in the car like a group of silly people. It was so much fun to go on our little side adventure and when we saw that sign off in the distance with that beautiful North Carolina flag on it, you would have thought we had all won the lottery. We took selfies with the sign like we were celebs, I got out and just wanted to touch the soil!
This short story is really a reminder that sometimes in life it’s all about the simple moments; the moments with family and friends that re-energize us and provide us with that sense of grounding that we all need from time to time.
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