My
daughter Randie and I like to take mini-road trips where we take a random route
away from the Fortress of Ineptitude.
Randie calls it going on an adventure.
Since Randie went off to college, we don’t get to go on adventures much but she’s home for spring break and this past Saturday, we hit the road for a new adventure.
Over the many times we’ve done this, there are only so many roads we haven’t been down but we found a route on Saturday that took us out into the countryside to the east of Greensboro in a direction we had not gone before.
We drove past fields and farm land.
We saw cows.
Yes, we went “Moo!” as we drove past the cows.
Why do people do that? We see cows in the fields along side the road and people will go “Moo!” as they drive past.
The thing about these adventures is to not go in any particular direction. We spend enough of our lives in our cars driving to a specified destination that we need to arrive at some specified time.
The core concept behind the adventure is to not have a destination and no particular time to get there.
Still, there does come a time when I have to decide its time to go back home.
On Saturday, we had been driving for about an hour and I saw a couple of roads going to the right that I knew that would take me back to Greensboro. I was a bit tired and I considered taking those roads so we could start to meander back home.
Instead, I chose to ignore them.
There was come compulsion to continue down the road I was on and see where it goes.
Randie was down with that.
Eventually the road led to a small town called Gibsonville. I had heard of the town and see the name on road signs along the interstate. But I had never been there before. This country road we were on led us to Gibsonville’s main street.
At the intersection, I saw road signs indicating a right hand turn would take me back towards home.
I opted to turn left.
Downtown Gibsonville has a quaint small town aesthetic that wouldn’t be out of place in Mayberry from the Andy Griffith Show. Unlike a lot of small towns these days, it looked like Gibsonville’s downtown is more alive than dead with some open stores, a bakery, an ice cream shop and an Italian restaurant.
At the end of this stretch of shops, there was an intersection to turn left or right. Going straight would take us into a parking lot.
I opted not to choose either road but pulled ahead straight into the parking lot.
And that’s where Randie and I discovered the railroad.
In a patch of park land, we found the Gibsonville Garden Railroad, an expansive network of miniature train tracks circling around clusters of miniature houses, stores and factories, crossing over a variety of scale model bridges.
Neither of us had ever seen anything like it. It was quite a wonder to behold.
A sign informed us this elaborate miniature train track park was started in 1996 by local resident, Bobby Summers, a retired Freight Conductor on the Southern Railroad.
Summers used his time and energies in retirement to create this amazing tableau. Mr. Summers died a few years ago but he has left a wonderful legacy, an endeavor of both hard work and imaginative whimsy.
Randie and I were both very impressed.
And to think, we found it completely by chance.
Every step on this adventure, decided at random, led us here.
Pick a road. Not this one, that one.
Come to a crossroads. Go straight, turn left, turn right.
Call it a day and head towards home or go a little bit further onward.
Reverse any choice, any action in that day’s adventure and my daughter and I would not be standing there looking at this astonishing handiwork of Mr. Bobby Summers.
Sometimes the universe surprises us with an unexpected moment of wonder when the adventure does not have a destination and no particular time to get there.
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Below are some pictures I found in the internet of the Gibsonville Garden Railroad.
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