Yesterday proved to be a much needed break from the day-to-day around here. I took Zeze with me and quite possibly created another tower nut.
Once again I was shown just how many people live here as it took over an hour to get to any site, which were all within 25 miles of here, simply due to sitting in bumper to bumper traffic… The worst was the hour plus it took to go four miles on 17.
At around noon we started off by sitting in line to buy gas at the local Sheetz then out of frustration we left and waited in line to buy gas at the local Wawa. Yes, Friday afternoon there were so many people out there driving around that we had to wait in line at gas stations with 12-15 pumps.
The only silver lining I can see on this is that here in Virginia expensive gas is $1.69 and cheap gas averages around $1.40.
Ok, after putting $12 into Zeze’s Lincoln we slogged our way to the highway and spent the next half an hour creeping towards exit 133… We live about 2 miles from exit 130 which is the FBerg exit on I-95.
The first site on the list was “Berea” and is located right next to the Geico building there in Stafford. It didn’t have any American Tower signs and the grounds had lots of old AT&T gear laying about, so I surmise that it’s still an AT&T tower.
Next up was “Stafford” which is located north-west of Stafford by about 5 miles. As with most AT&T tower sites, Stafford is located on the Virginia equivalent of a mountain… A mole hill that rises roughly 80 feet out of the surrounding swamp.
From Stafford we decided to hit the other two sites I’d wanted to visit. This is where it took us an hour to cover four miles back to I-95 on 17, then once we were back on I-95 it took another half an hour to get to exit 126 from exit 133.
Once we got off the highway and out into the wilds of Virginia things got a little better. Our next stop was “Corbin” which is across the road from the north boundary of Fort A.P. Hill.
From Corbin we went south a little bit more along the west side of A.P. Hill to just north of Bowling Green, to, well, “Bowling Green”.
This site was the best find of the day as it still had it’s horns and was a very unique style of relay site. Of note was the design of the building and the fact that there were nine huge concrete guy-wire blocks ringing the site. I’m not sure what used to be at the Bowling Green facility, but it wasn’t free standing and based on the locations of the blocks, it was big.
After that last find we decided that as we were already out and had already spent the lion’s share of the day sitting in traffic, that we might as well sit in it some more and get our trip to the CompUSA in Woodbridge out of the way.
So off we went and spent nearly two hours getting from exit 126 to exit 156. I bought Zeze this new bluetooth connected headphone thing and picked up the external firewire drive case and 120gig drive I’d been saving for.
We took route 1, which parallels I-95 on the east side from Woodbridge back to FBerg and even with the traffic lights we made it back in 45 minutes. We got home at about 10pm…
So with an average time “on site” at the towers of about 15 minutes, 30 minutes to get gas and another half an hour in CompUSA we spent eight hours sitting in traffic yesterday and went a total of 102 miles in that time… So we averaged what, about 13 miles per hour? Eheh… I love Virginia.
