Virginia announced itself gently.
The mountains of West Virginia had been dramatic and demanding — beautiful in the way that requires your full attention. Virginia was different. Around Middleburg, the land softened into something almost European — pretty houses set back from the road, fields rolling easy and wide, hedgerows and horses and a particular quality of afternoon light that made everything look considered, composed, like someone had arranged it all with care. If West Virginia was a poem that grabbed you by the collar, Virginia was one you found on a quiet shelf and kept returning to.
I kept looking at the signposts of Highway 50 E, that has been the North Star to my compass and a familiar friend. How a particular font, colour and design connects with you in a situation is quite something in the trivia that’s life!
I was heading to Aldie. A small, unhurried town in Loudoun County where Twinkle Apa and Subrat Bhai had made their home with their two daughters and, newest to the family, a dog called Lola.
I had been to this house before. In 2013, on my last visit to America — the trip where I had landed at Dulles International and Twinkle Apa had come to pick me up. Her younger daughter Sayona had been barely a year old then, carried in arms, all eyes and unawareness. Her elder daughter Ishu had been in Grade 3 or 4, small and curious. Twelve years is a long time. Ishu was now at UCLA. Sayona was in Grade 8. The house was the same, the warmth was the same, but time had done what time does — quietly and completely rearranged everything within the familiar outline.
Subrat Bhai was in the driveway when I pulled in.
He gave me a tight hug — the kind that needs no words and uses none. And then Lola arrived, all energy and enthusiasm and absolutely no concept of personal space, jumping at me with the complete conviction that this was the correct response to a guest arriving after a long journey. She was not wrong.
Lola was social, vibrant, and entirely certain of her own importance in any room or driveway she occupied. We became friends immediately, which is the only speed at which you can become friends with a dog like Lola.
I had been alone for days. Not unhappily alone — the solitude of the road had been chosen, enjoyed, wrestled with and ultimately cherished. But alone nonetheless. And now here was Twinkle Apa's warmth, familiar food, familiar language, the sound of a household going about its life around me. I felt it settle over me like a blanket you had forgotten you owned.
I stayed four days.
We walked Lola through the neighbourhood in the mornings, which Lola treated as a serious professional obligation. We drove to Manassas National Battlefield Park, where the Civil War had been fought in the fields that now lay quiet and marked with careful signage — the details, the dates, the human cost of it all laid out with the solemn precision that American historical parks do very well. It was impressive in the way that places of genuine consequence always are, even when the grass has grown back and the cannons have been made decorative.
The drives around Virginia were done in Subrat Bhai and Twinkle Apa's Tesla. I was not consulted about this arrangement. The couple had heard a summary of my West Virginia adventures — the GPS gone, the toothless signpost, the farmer, the unpaved road, the fuel warning — and had reached a swift and unanimous verdict. No more driving for the guest. I debated this with them, twice, with diminishing conviction each time. The Tesla stayed in their hands. I sat in the back with Lola, which was, I will admit, not a bad outcome.
I did win one small negotiation. Philadelphia.
It had not been part of any plan — nothing about this trip had been particularly faithful to plans — but I had read about it and could not walk past it. The first capital of the United States, the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed, where the Constitution was written, where a young nation had argued itself into existence. I would drive there on my way to New York.
On the way, the road made one more spontaneous offer and I accepted it — Annapolis, Maryland. A port town of quiet beauty and deep history, sitting where the Severn River meets the Chesapeake Bay. I found myself, by a series of small accidents of timing and curiosity, inside a live legislative session. I watched the proceedings for a while, understanding some of it, moved by the ordinariness of democracy in action — the arguing, the procedure, the patient accumulation of governance. Then I stepped back out into the Annapolis afternoon.
Before Philadelphia, there was one final errand. I drove the Nissan Altima to Chantilly to return it.
On the way, I stopped at Manassas — the battlefield again, this time alone, on my own time, with the particular attention you can only give a place when no one is waiting. And somewhere in the logistics of the return, I made a discovery. I had a whole day saved. An entire day that I had not accounted for, had not planned around, had simply driven into existence by covering more ground than I had imagined possible.
A colleague had told me this before I left — you always underestimate how much you can drive in America. I had nodded politely and not quite believed him. He was right. America is a country that runs on roads and is, in some essential way, run by them. The highway is not just infrastructure here — it is identity, it is freedom, it is the original promise of the place made physical and paved.
I handed back the keys to the Nissan Altima at Chantilly. It had carried me from Normal, Illinois to Virginia — through Route 66 and Highway 50, through thunderstorms and mountain roads without signal, through rust belt towns and West Virginia woods, past a signpost with a toothless grin and down an unpaved road a farmer had pointed me toward on faith alone.
It was an unassuming car. It did not let me down once.
It’s Always Sunny in Philly?
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