Richmond, Virginia – Part 1 – It's a wanderful life, so it is

When we researched where we should go after Pensacola, Richmond ticked lots of boxes. It was fairly easy to get to and was a much larger city. There are lots of nearby places that we fancy visiting and it has a rich and difficult history to explore.

What we hadn’t expected was the beauty of the James river. There can’t be many cities that have as spectacular a geographical feature right at their centre. I have a reputation for not liking nature but that’s not quite true. I like it – for a bit – but then the novelty wears off. Richmond has the best of both worlds though.

We stay on the opposite side of the James from downtown, which means we always have the pleasure of cutting through a wetland park before crossing the river when walking into the city centre. And we’ve done a lot of walking here – 46 miles in the first five days.

The paths are mostly easy to navigate, although we did attempt the cutesy-sounding Buttermilk Trail only to discover it’s designed for advanced mountain bikers. I think we earned our Jungle Explorer badges that day!

Where there’s a river, there needs to be flood defences and Richmond’s are very impressive. Built between 1992 and 1995 to withstand once-in-a-century events, the walls are up to 46 feet high and include huge storm doors, gates and underground channels to help manage the deluge. In 1972, hurricane Agnes devasted the city and, although the flood defences have been used since then, there has not yet been a full deployment. Let’s hope it’ll be enough to handle the future climate.

And where there’s a nature park, there are animals, including the green snake that Mhairi and Niall almost trod on, which allowed us to test out that old saying – “It’s more scared of us than we are of it”. Aye, right!!

Another big Richmond surprise for us is that the public buses here are free. That would be surprising enough in Europe but, for America, it seems positively communistic. Apparently, it was something that started during Covid and the authorities simply decided to continue with it. The irony is that, despite free public transport, we keep doing lots of walking as there’s so much to see. We’re back in a big city again and we’re drinking it all in. Perhaps too literally though.

Richmond restricts the sale of alcoholic spirits to state-controlled liquor stores. This makes them a little harder to find but Mhairi doesn’t care as the prices are so low. The equivalent cost of a bottle of vodka here is £6.52 compared to Scotland’s new minimum price of £17.06. Mhairi may never be coming home! 😉

We’ve headed over to the Carytown district a few times. It a hip and happening part of the city where we cold indulge our mural fetish.

Niall and I went to a bar there for a Sunday American Football session. The place was buzzing, full of fans supporting different teams probably because Richmond has a couple of universities as well as being the state capital. Someone even brought their mascot, a scary horror baby whose purpose was presumably less to cheer on their own team than to curse the opposition!