City Shopping - Part 4
- Lamar Shahbazian
- Aug 16
- 17 min read
Updated: Aug 19
This blog is written as a follow on to Part 1, written after our first trip to Northern VA. You might be wondering what happened to Part 2 and 3? We did take city shopping trips in 2025 to Colorado, and in April, 2026 to Washington State, but we are no longer considering those as potential destinations so I didn't write about them. There were some fun learnings during those trips, though, so I'll keep the placeholder titles in case I get around to writing about them someday.
This blog is to recap our recent trip to DC/MD/VA. In fact, we just got back last night, and my head is swimming with all the things that we learned on this trip, so I am actually hoping that writing about it helps me organize it in my mind.
What we found on this trip is that it REALLY helps to go there in person, to spend more time, and to stay in a home vs. a hotel. For this trip, we stayed for 3 weeks, starting with a few days in DC in a hotel, then moving to Silver Spring, MD and renting an AirBNB for a week, then moving to an AirBNB outside of Leesburg for another week. I'll start with a high level recap of our impressions, then try to talk in more detail about the criteria that we are continuing to refine.
First of all, I will say that proximity to our family is moving up on the list. When we first created our list of potential destinations, it included places that Katelyn and Sam MIGHT relocate to, but as I considered living in a place where NO ONE in our family lived, it seemed silly to move there. At the same time, Rick and I don't plan to follow our kids around, since they might move again, so this won't be the only criteria. On this trip, we were able to spend a lot of time with Sam and Katelyn, including several dinners while we were in DC, one of which was a birthday dinner, as well as a fun BBQ with Rick’s brother, John, and his wife, Martine. Rick's brother lives in Herndon, and they have been there a long time. There are a number of benefits to knowing someone who has lived locally a long time. For instance, for this trip Katelyn provided this document with ideas of things to do in the DC area. So helpful! Ethan was with us, so he got to spend time with Katelyn and Sam, even working from their place. He also became re-acquainted with Rick's brother and his wife, whom he hadn't seen since he was 7 or 8.
Other impressions include picturing ourselves in the environment. One day we went to a Farmer's Market. This was one trip that was negatively impacted by the rain, but you could tell other shoppers were used to it. They just huddled under the booths with bigger tents, or whipped out their umbrellas. I noticed you can get good deals on large quantities of fruit (this day it was tomatoes) so if I wanted to do some canning I could have a supply. We also visited a nearby botanical garden, and spent a pleasant hour there, including observing turtles and frogs. The boys did get some bug bites, though!
One of the things we experienced was the process of "getting around". When we stayed in DC, it was super-convenient to walk to the grocery store, coffee place, dinner restaurants, and all the attractions such as the Smithsonian museums, but it also reminded me why I don't picture us living in a big city. The traffic, the people everywhere, the noise (in DC that includes a lot of air traffic), and the lack of green space make it a place I like to visit but wouldn't want to live in.
On the other hand, driving in MD compared to VA were contrasting experiences, too. Both were convenient to DC and had metro stops fairly close by, but the number of highways and narrow, winding, wooded roads in MD made it so you had to drive somewhere to go for a walk. You couldn't really see the scenery in most areas because of the dense trees. The towns were bigger, including skyscrapers and dense housing. VA seemed much more "wide-open", where there were trees but also lots of open space full of rolling green hills. There were highways but the areas we were looking at didn't require you to get on a multi-lane freeway to get around. We saw the occasional field of cows or horses, and even saw some crops growing. And I felt like I could go for walks without driving (depending on specifically where we end up, of course).
The other thing you can't get unless you're there in person is a feel for the people who live there. This turned out to be the biggest learning on this trip, and being in one place for longer allowed us to do that. I have found that visiting hardware stores is a fun way to assess a town. In both downtown Leesburg and Purcellville, we found hardware stores that reminded me of Coast to Coast in Mariposa. Maybe I just have a soft spot for them because Mom worked there so long, but if I find a "good" hardware store (well-stocked, knowledgeable employees) it makes me feel better about a town. In a "big box store" town (like Rohnert Park here in CA) I would feel less at home. And I figure having a good hardware store just makes sense if you're going to own a home in the area!
We can also get a sense of the people by visiting restaurants. We had a great experience in the town of Kensington, MD, close to our AirBNB. We found a really good pizza place (Frankly...Pizza) and our waiter was a super-friendly young man named Luke. Even the manager seemed personable. It was a place full of regulars, and I could imagine if we lived there we'd eat there often.
When Rick and I were driving around we stopped at a little shopping center called Potomoc Village. We first started at the bakery, and while the coffee was good, I was kind of turned off by one of the customers. She was what I call a "Marin Mom". While I know that's horrible stereotyping, those of you who are familiar with Marin County will know what I'm talking about. The women who "do lunch", and spend their day in expensive workout clothes, getting facials or doing yoga and not much else. This woman was more of a professional type, but she stormed in, cut right in front of everyone, ordered a box full of pastries, and stormed out like she was going to a fire. Or probably a meeting to which she was obligated to bring refreshments.
At the same time, that shopping center also had a great hardware store, including a sign on the seeds that said "deer resistant" which made me laugh. Here, plants are only deer resistant when there is a lot else for them to eat. When they get hungry, the list changes!
We also went to lunch at a Chipotle in that same shopping center. Definitely a place for the working man, as it was full of young people who were clearly on a lunch break. It definitely gave us a feel for that area of MD.
In Purcellville, which is the town I felt most at home in, we went to the hardware store, and followed it up by lunch at the Purcellville Pub. The waitress was one of those types that calls you "honey", and everyone working there seemed happy. Other places that we found that felt like "my people" were the Mercantile in Hamilton, and the huge nursery just outside town. More on those later.
Staying at AirBNB's was definitely a good move, as it allowed us to feel at home, spread out, and do ordinary things like grocery shop and hang out outdoors. I was delighted to see fireflies in both MD and VA, and we experienced wildlife such as squirrels, chipmunks, and deer. On the other hand, I didn't see a gopher mound in either state!
We hit the jackpot in the VA AirBNB, because the owner there was a big gardener so I got to know her a little. Our first clue was the plate of vegetables she shared in the house we rented (in addition to coffee, cold drinks, a Brita full of cold water and a freezer container full of ice cubes). I started by asking her what to save for recycling, and if she had a compost pile I could contribute to. Her name is Erin, and she was accommodating on both. When I saw that she had a big garden, I went and introduced myself. She grows flowers and makes bouquets for the local mercantile and for the occasional wedding. She was a member of a long-time dairy family, and the 10 acres she lived on also had houses for her Dad and her brother, as well as the AirBNB home. I picked her brain a bit on gardening (how early could you plant things here? April, usually, although she spends a lot of time in the garden in the winter covering and uncovering plants). We felt right at home in her place, and enjoyed the comfortable home, homey touches, beautiful views, butterflies and wildlife, and learning about her garden. Notice no underwire, they don't have gophers and moles! As we left, she thanked me for the "piles of weeds". That's a first!
On the last day when I went down to the garden to dump compost, she was there with another woman whom she had just met. The woman had moved from Minnesota to be near her daughter who is getting married this fall, and was talking to Erin (the owner) about potentially doing flowers for her daughter's wedding. She had been referred by Hillary, who owned the nursery we had been to. We struck up a conversation about moving away from all your friends and gardening in a new area, and I felt like I had made TWO friends already.
One more experience that I'll relate about "finding your people". There was a small town called Hamilton that was even closer than Purcellville to where we stayed. It had a mercantile, which turned out to be a great place! Imagine healthy produce, natural medicine, a coffee bar, and homemade gifts. All in a place about the size of my kitchen. Fun!
In driving through Hamilton, I noticed not one but TWO United Methodist Churches. Definitely something to check out next time we spend time there. Being part of a "dying" congregation here, I checked out their website and it seems like they have a lot going on.
So you can see how being there in person is a whole different experience than researching online.
Onto those criteria. One of the reasons we went in the summer, and spent a long time, was to REALLY get a feel for the weather. According to this website I found earlier, there are 147 days of "comfortable" weather in our favorite town of Purcellville. That's slightly more than Washington, DC (136) and slightly less than Seattle (149). Honestly, the only place with lots more comfortable days is the coast of California and some areas of Florida.
In addition to heat and humidity, the thing I didn't expect to experience was RAIN! I'm not sure why not, since I knew that it is common to have thunderstorms in the afternoons, but what I didn't know is how unpredictable the rain is. The night that Ethan and Rick were flying in I was watching the weather closely. Initially it said to expect 1.5" in the next 24 hours, then later in the day it said 4.5", then back to .5". Here in California, if you look at the weather app on your phone, the prediction of WHEN the rain will start is surprisingly accurate. It says it will start raining at 2 p.m., and most of the time, it does. When I was tracking it back there, it would change throughout the day, so you never really know when it's going to rain. When it's raining in the summer it's also WARM, which I've never experienced. So I guess you just carry an umbrella all the time and be flexible with your plans (or willing to get wet).
Here's an example of a rainstorm toward the end of our trip. Big drops, hard rain, the type of storm we rarely get in CA. You would definitely get wet if you were out in this.
I have never lived in an area that experienced a lot of humidity, although on our trip to CO we experienced a LACK of humidity so I gained an appreciation for the amount we have in Petaluma. Here, the humidity was high, but you also have heat. It was in the 70s and 80s most of the time we were there, so it wasn't too bad, but I can imagine if it's in the 90s it would be very uncomfortable. Even without that, when you go outside early in the morning, or when we'd get home at 9 p.m., it felt so unusual to still have it be warm enough that I wouldn't want to "work" outside. The humidity also seemed like it fluctuated throughout the day, and I don't know why, so we'd have to learn more about that. I did ask Erin if I could weed her garden outside the AirBNB we were renting, so I could experience working outside in the humidity, and it wasn't too bad. I waited until after dinner one evening, and was out there for about an hour. It wasn't too uncomfortable, but I think you would definitely have to find a time that the weather is reasonably cool and it wasn't raining to be comfortable working outdoors.
I already wrote about the traffic. Obviously, getting around in Washington, D.C. is either by walking, on the metro, or via Uber. In the two areas we stayed at AirBNB's, you had to drive to get anywhere. Driving in MD was via city streets or lots of different highways. While we found our way around, being surrounded by trees most of the time was very disorienting, and you couldn't really SEE anything beyond trees in most places. In VA, there were more rolling hills and the occasional view, glimpsing the Appalachians in the distance. Depending on where we end up living, we might be able to walk in the area or to town.
I did appreciate the metro, which ran all the way up to Silver Spring, and to within a 20 minute drive of our stay in VA. We used it to go into DC to see Katelyn (10 minute walk to her place), and one night I took it into DC from VA to meet Katelyn and her friend Sossina for pedicures and dinner. I got home around 9 p.m., but the whole trip felt very safe and it was so much more convenient than driving. So while I would have thought we didn't care about distance to the metro, depending on where Katelyn ends up living this might weigh into things. As you might imagine, for commuters this is VERY important and thus housing prices vary based on distance to the metro.
One of the things we had noticed on our prior trip was the amount of GRASS there is in VA, and most of it is MOWED!!! Even large "estates" (I call them McMansions), which have acres of lawn, keep it neatly mowed. Homes in town on smaller lots, also are closely mowed. Even what appears to be public land, like along the highways, are often mowed. It blows my mind how much time and energy that takes.
Check out the average rainfall per month in Purcellville. This explains why it is so green, and that mowing must happen every month until winter snows cover the ground. When Brian lived in Michigan for grad school, he said during the summer the grounds keepers mowed, and during the winter they plowed snow. It would be interesting to observe this throughout the year.
But I have to say that being surrounded by green, neatly mowed grass as you're moving around was soothing and PRETTY! Contrasting that to driving around Petaluma, where the grass is dry and mostly not mowed, where there is often trash along the highways, and people's yards are sometimes not cared for, was a marked difference. But the price you pay is all that rain. And somehow that mowing gets paid for.
Our process to check out the neighborhoods we might want to live morphed during the trip. Katelyn gave us some initial info about Maryland, based on the house-hunting she and Sam did last year, and then Nancy, her mother-in-law, gave us much more detailed input based on her knowledge (they are moving to MD and have family in the area). She shared detailed info on neighborhoods we might be interested in, and in addition to sharing links on niche.com, which I knew about, she shared some from nextdoor.com, which I've used here in Petaluma but it is mostly used for things like "lost dogs" or recommendations. I didn't realize it had detailed info on neighborhoods. More to explore!
While there in person, we decided to spend our time exploring neighborhoods vs. doing a lot of online research. In MD, we mostly did a little research on the map, then drove around taking notes and photos. Back home, we would research home prices and sizes, and take notes of our impressions. Overall, the prices were a lot more expensive than I expected, but again we were in a pretty desirable area, and it's commutable to DC.
Here's an example of the document we created through this process. As you can see, we started taking note of when the house was built as well as how large the lot was as we realized those things were important to us. In some neighborhoods, the homes were VERY old, like 100 years old, and we don't think we want to take on something like that. But it seemed like the alternative were very large homes that were very expensive. I'm sure with the help of a real estate agent or more online searching we can find more of what we're looking for, but the above process was helpful. At this point, we've eliminated Maryland, and for this trip, it was onto Virginia!
One of the things Nancy helped us identify was places with a small-town feel. I realized this is really important to me. Growing up in Mariposa (where you can walk the ENTIRE town), to San Luis Obispo for college (which has a great downtown, and where I also walked a ton because we only had one car while there), to Petaluma (where we live too far out of town to walk but which also has a great downtown and a community feeling), I am not looking to live in a place that doesn't have that community vibe to it. My kids would call that "finding your people".
In between MD and VA, we stayed one night in a hotel near Dulles airport. This area was full of tall buildings housing businesses, shopping centers, and apartment buildings. Interestingly, across from the hotel was a senior living facility, but it looked just like another apartment building to me. I definitely WOULD NOT want to live in an area like this. Too sterile and unfriendly. Probably great for young people just starting out, like the young man I observed at the coffee shop in the downstairs of one of these apartment building areas, who was clearly a regular talking to the barista, but not so great for a retired couple looking to spend time outdoors.
The other thing that happened between MD and VA was I talked to Brian by phone on my birthday. He is an expert house-hunter since he and Anujin had purchased a home in the Sonoma area, and he gave me several ideas that I hadn't thought of. One was to use the filters on Zillow and find places for sale or for rent BEFORE we went driving. That way we could hone in on places for sale vs. trying to find an address of a place not for sale, which isn't always there. We aren't looking to buy a home right now, so it was less important for us than it was for them, but it was still useful and we used that technique in VA. He also suggested we go to open houses, another filter on Zillow, but we had plans for the weekend so that didn't happen. But I did use a "number of bedrooms" filter on Zillow, and that was VERY eye-opening. Look what happens when you look for "any" number of bedrooms vs. "exactly 3". This confirms what we had noticed in MD, many of the newer homes are HUGE. We saw one for sale that was 16,000 square feet, 7 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms. Crazy!
Most of the homes under $1 million are either townhomes or very old. For instance, this one is on 12 acres and cost $999,000, but was built in 1740! Not something you'd find in CA, for sure! Given that we weren't looking to buy a townhome, and weren't really in the market for a home at this point, we mainly used this to get an idea for how much you would get for your money in this area.
The other tip that Brian gave me, which I NEVER would have thought of, is to use ChatGPT to find areas to search in. This turned out to be VERY useful. If you have used ChatGPT in the past, you know it's really interactive, like a "chat" would be with a person, so this document "winds its way around as I asked and answered questions". It even pulled in information from prior chats (scary!) about school gardens and my Petaluma Women's Club involvement, and started recommending things I might enjoy doing in different areas.
Katelyn nicely printed it for me, and we used it during our week in VA to search out areas. As before, we would highlight an area to drive in, this time adding in information about houses for sale in that area, and spend a few hours driving, taking photos and notes.
While the information from ChatGPT wasn't perfect, it did yield a few "jewels". Some ways it messed up were some of the "neighborhoods" either couldn't be found (for instance, it said that outside Leesburg there was a neighborhood called "Edwards Landing", but all we could find on Google Maps was a park called Edwards Landing). It also identified several places that had not been built yet.
Our first day driving, we headed toward Purcellville the "back way" from our AirBNB, and it took us through a little town called Lincoln. I found it very charming, and when we stopped at the post office for me to mail some letters I found that they also sell eggs on the front porch! And had the most gorgeous flowers growing. My later research indicates this community was originally settled in the 1750's by Quakers, and our AirBNB owner Erin mentioned she went to school at the Quaker school nearby, so it would be interesting to learn more about that.
Lincoln is only 1.5 miles from Purcellville, so before we knew it we were there! We stopped at the hardware store because I always think that's a good time, and I observed the largest quantity of Milwaukee tools ever! The young man helping an older man was seemingly showing him things he could get for free because he was such a good customer (?). I was trying not to be obvious as I was eavesdropping but I did observe that the young man seemed to know what he was talking about. I always enjoy seeing what's sold locally. For instance, I don't think I've seen oil sold in those quantities, but clearly it's for the turkey deep fryer. Thinking about Thanksgiving already or do people regularly fry turkeys here? Who knows?!!! As we were driving around, we also saw a "mower store", which I imagine is greatly needed in this area.
During this drive we also passed a huge nursery, and later we came back to check it out. Talk about "finding your people!". It's a good thing we were flying home so I couldn't buy much. I did get some seeds, and some items for a small care package for Katelyn's friend Sossina who is looking to build her first garden. We talked to the owner several times, she said the place had been totally renovated a few years back. It is now VERY nice, and includes a blend of old greenhouses (moved from the location where the Pentagon is now), and some idiosyncrasies (she has rescued parrots onsite).
Here are a few pictures of the place. It was massive - like 90 acres. Good to know there is a resource like this in the area, for knowledgeable staff as well as supplies for gardening. Some of the things I observed on our quick tour:
Gotta love a nursery with a coffee cart!
Well-organized greenhouses, with each being something specific (native, non-native, houseplants, etc.).
Well-marked information for each.
Lots of indoor supplies, for shopping on those rainy days!
Tons of houseplants - it occurred to me that I likely won't be moving my plants, so I'll need to find a source for new ones eventually. Or make friends with people that gift me some!
It turns out this owner was the one who referred the woman who moved and had a daughter getting married to Erin, our AirBNB owner. Talk about community!
I did get a feel for the type of landscaping many people do, what I had been seeing was basically using native plants for landscaping. Here's an example of an area they had planted with native plants. Lots of black-eyed Susan's in the area, I looked it up and it turns out they are a wildflower in this area!
I also realized when we visited Rick's brother John that he is an expert gardener in this area, so maybe I could get him to mentor me.
So to recap our city shopping experience, I definitely went in with a "don't want to do this" mentality, but trying to keep an open mind. And I'm glad I did, because I could definitely see myself living in the area we stayed in VA. Our plan is to move there next year and rent a place initially, maybe even staying in AirBNB's so we don't have to move furniture and home stuff. We plan to keep our home here in CA for a little while, possibly renting it out or arranging for the care in some other way. We'll see how it goes living near family, handling the weather, and experiencing the culture in a new state. I will be very sad to move away from family and friends here, but I think it's worth a try to see if this area can provide a better living experience. And we'll still visit the West Coast to see friends and family!
Beautiful pictures. They say "Virginia is for Lovers!" It is near and dear to my heart to be certain. I hope you two eventually find your next Happy Place.