...another picture tour of my favorite city

Not that I ever want to live in Richmond, but it's a gorgeous city--run down, built up and falling to pieces in a genteel way, like an old Southern dame with heavy pancake. I couldn't go last weekend because it rained, and there's nothing worse than driving hundreds of miles in the rain.

Guess I've been distracted, because I forgot it was St. Paddy's day weekend. Richmond closed part of Main St. and there were bikers all over the place. I didn't take any pictures because I was busy doing the protective-mom thing, giving guys the "look". Nothing like three blocks of drunk people milling around chugging plastic dixie cups of green beer. They tried to give it a family feel by bringing in the twisty balloon clown, but the clown scares me too. Not just my kid. Something about the nose? We went to go check out the old train station instead.

A couple years back I had this thing about train-travel. Amtrak goes right through the heart of Richmond. The tracks are all elevated, like you're riding a hundred years into the past, past red-bricked buildings that look like something out of the Civil War. Whenever I think of Richmond, I think of old warehouses with peeling white-paint logos.

This is the old-entrance. It's closed off now because the wrought iron stairs are rusted.



...and the building itself, like some kind of rococo wedding cake fantasy from Budapest or something.



I went up to the clerk inside and said, (okay, so I gushed...) "this is such a beautiful building! You don't mind if I take pictures, right?" She sighed, but let me go up to the waiting room.





...the, uhm--atmosphere? Is real. All half-lit and gloomy, like there's some kind of door back to the Biedermeir period.

I got lost. I took the wrong turn and went into downtown when I'd mapquested my way to Maymont Botanical Gardens. Everything I had was backwards and twenty or thirty blocks off. I found Monument Drive by mistake, but I meant to get a picture of the Lee memorial anyway.



There's a lot of renovation, re-claimation, whatever you call it when the bad side turns into the good side, but for awhile, they all exist side-by-side. Another wrong turn took me down into the neighborhood Cowboy told me to avoid. I wanted to stop, but there were a lot of people hanging out, and it didn't seem like a good idea. Cowboy is big, and while I'm mean, I'm not that mean. I did slow down long enough for my kid to get a picture of Keegan's childhood home.



I don't know what I did before digital cameras...