A year after I graduated from college—having both free time and disposable income for the first time in my life—I decided to get a new Pokémon. The income, part-time bookstore wages, wasn’t terribly high, so rather than hit up the fancy shops at Tysons Corner or pay the exorbitant fee to capture one from Shenandoah National Park (the nearest patch of public land where interesting ‘mons could be found), I turned to Craigslist first. Surely someone on there had a recently laid Egg they’d part with for a smile and the assurance of a good home.
Nope. Even those sellers knew their stuff—the pickings were either Pidgeys for a pittance or purebred Piplups for not much less than what the Tysons dealers were charging. With Pokémon, as with anything else, there’s no such thing as a free lunch—especially in Northern Virginia.
I did, however, find an advertisement for a breeder’s fair out in Manassas. Kind of a haul, but there might be some deals there. I’d at least come away with a better sense of the market, of how much those Piplups were really worth.
And so, one hot August afternoon, I found myself inching down I-66 among the weekend traffic, headed for that huge park beside Bull Run.
And various other landforms. Read on for trip reports, geography facts, hallucinated Pokemon, and madcap hijinks.
