Saturday commute iv

There's a fair amount of this kind of transit in the Virginia Piedmont - Albemarle, Orange, Fauquier counties primarily - and it is highly impractical, as you might suppose. But that quality, alone, is enough to recommend it to this domain of massive resistance in all things, even if it hadn't legendary antiquity, the flattery of William Makepeace Thackeray's romance (ca 1857, subtitled, A Tale of the Last Century), and the maldistributed wealth of an agrarian economy, still intractably feudal to this day, behind it. 

The Virginia Piedmont's version of bread and circuses reaches a genuinely glossy pinnacle on the first Saturday in November, at a DuPont-built racetrack at the front door of James Madison's DuPont-expunged residence, Montpelier. If you should find yourself in Virginia for a year, this is the 1 day you may be tempted to cite for suspending judgment upon the other 364. It is, rather, the annual feast day of a lingering dark ages.

The Jack Russell Terrier races distinguish the occasion. Horses run pretty much the same, all over the world. But when the de facto State Dog is in play, attention is most passionately paid.