All posts tagged: Staunton VA

I Believe Thanksgiving is my New Favorite Holiday

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I’m not sure what has been my favorite holiday, but I think Thanksgiving has now taken over the top rung on the ladder.  I think it may be the fact that big business hasn’t yet figured out a way to commercialize it.  Or perhaps it is the fact that food plays a big role.  I like the focus on the act of being thankful for all we have in a country that’s been abundantly blessed. Then again, maybe it is just that we’ve figured out how to get together with people we really enjoy and have a very relaxing time.  Whatever the reason, it is my new favorite holiday. Candice and I have always enjoyed Thanksgiving.  For many years we traveled over the mountain from Staunton to a wonderful inn, Prospect Hill, for a bountiful Thanksgiving dinner.  It was especially meaningful to us because we honeymooned at Prospect Hill while we were very poor graduate students.  Little did we realize that just a year after our wedding we’d move to Virginia and be an hour away.  With …

The Best Places to Raise Your Children…Murfreesboro Edition

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(NOTE: See my 2020 update to this post here.) Business Week magazine just included Murfreesboro, Tennessee as one of the best places to raise your children.  Well, if they’d just asked me I could have told them that a long time ago. For years now, I’ve been using a little vignette about growing up in Murfreesboro as a part of a talk I give about the livability of towns and cities.  While Business Week focuses on Murfreesboro as a recession-proof college town, I believe there’s a lot more to it. When I think of home, I remember 407 East Main Street in Murfreesboro.  I grew up in Murfreesboro when it was a city of 35,000 people.  My parents bought a simple 1880s-era home on Main Street because it had an apartment where my grandmother could live with us.  Over the course of twenty years, four generations of our family lived under this roof. Murfreesboro has a history that was very real and very present to me as a child.  I could walk four blocks to the town square, …