Yeah, these guys are everywhere. As a Roanoke alumbud dryly observed, they multiply like rabbits.
Say what you want about my photography skills, but I think that second shot of the little guy mid-leap is pretty neat.
There is a tiny brown bunny who keeps approaching my door, but racing away whenever I open it. I haven’t figured out that yet. He’s like a Mormon with a social anxiety disorder.
My Fredricksbud declined my offer to bring him an Official City of Roanoke, Virginia, commemorative mug. (You’d figure those things would be in higher demand.) So I brought him a … fidget spinner!!! There it is, below … fidgety-spinning, I guess. All jokes aside? The allure of these (surprisingly pricey) fad toys is entirely lost on me. That thing entertained me for less than two minutes. (And it is generally agreed upon that I have the mind of a child.)
Falmouth Bridge heading west into downtown.
George Street looking north to Caroline Street.
Caroline Street. I must say that the entire town looks far better than when I last spent a lot of time here in 1995. There are more and better stores, and the downtown area even looks better maintained. Of course, the mid-1990’s economy wasn’t doing so well.
Pictured below is Goolrick’s Drugs.
The reopened Sammy T’s!
Looking west up Hanover Street from Caroline Street.
At Benny Vitali’s on Caroline Street. The pizzas and individual slices there are twice the normal size. It seems like a decent marketing device; how many Mary Washington College students wouldn’t want to order a giant pizza? The pizza is cheap and damned good too.
A mural on Sophia Street.
The corner of William Street and Princess Anne Street, heading west.
The Confederate Cemetery (and Fredericksburg City Cemetery) as seen from Washington Avenue. My apologies for including this — for some reason, I’ve always really liked speeding car shots.
Off I-81 North from Roanoke, maybe? Or was it I-64 East?
Given my lifelong penchant for getting lost, I’m probably lucky I made it home to sit here struggling to remember …
Hey, my neighborhood’s home-crashing hare is back! I call him Random Rabbit because he has no burrow — he just randomly selects backyards to occupy. He was my guest for a while, but then he ambled across the street and inhabited another backyard. (I think he was annoyed by my picture-taking.) I think he just crashes random residences like a big, weird, puffy white houseguest. (Think Kato Kaelin.)
Roanoke’s ecosystem puzzles me. This is a slow, truly torpid prey animal who seems to have little healthy apprehension about other animals. He’s doing just fine, though. A nearby pit bull usually just gives him a wary stare … maybe dogs and cats are afraid of him because he’s so huge? This picture doesn’t do him justice — he’s the biggest rabbit I’ve ever seen. He’s probably about the size of General Woundwort from “Watership Down.”
[Update, 6/5/17:] Okay now all my friends are telling me he is very likely an abandoned pet. So I might start feeding him. My pals are recommending “dandelions, lemon balm, and carrot tops.”
I myself am just relieved that other people can see him. I was harboring a pet hypothesis that he was my equivalent of “Frank” from “Donnie Darko.” (He’s almost as big.)
This photo isn’t one of my own; nor was it taken around Roanoke. This was taken from Chimney Rock Mountain, which is just north of Charlottesville, Virginia.
I pulled it off of Wikimedia Commons, though, because the mountains around Roanoke look so much like this. (And the camera I am using just cannot do them justice.) I get to see something like this every day. It’s wild.
Photo credit: By Chimney_Rock_Mountain_Overlook.jpg: Ed Brown derivative work: Patrick {oѺ∞} (Chimney_Rock_Mountain_Overlook.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Yeah, okay — so May 19th is just Roanoke’s annual Drive-All-Over-the-Road Day.
Way to make your own holiday, there, Roanoke.
(The headline above is an MST3K reference.)
That sounds like a hand for a children’s card game.
I encountered all of these during just a six-minute walk outside my friend’s house yesterday. The jackrabbit, the deer and one of the baby groundhogs were all too fast for me to get a shot of.
The baby groundhogs were adorable – they’re just nervous little balls of brown fur. The trick is sneaking up behind them. (Watch your six, groundhogs.)
Once again, heading into Roanoke Southwest.
April was National Child Abuse Awareness Month. I kept seeing these “pinwheel gardens” in front of businesses — mostly in Roanoke, though the one below was in Salem.
It seems to me to be a clever and effective marketing device. Whoever came up with it deserves a lot of credit.
It’s the psychedelic pizza joint with the life-sized Transformer out back.
That’s an unusual marketing strategy.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 