Everything Happens on Little Creek Road

If you've been here a few weeks, you already know the first one.

We'd just brought home a hundred-dollar puppy with no name. About a week later I'm coming off the highway at the Little Creek Road exit, and it hits me out of nowhere: Zeeba.

I didn't think anything of it. It was an exit ramp.

The first deed

I'm still in the Navy, and my wife and I buy our first house. The first one either of us had ever owned, and only a handful in our families. It was a VA loan. I was my own first case study.

Where? Bayview. Right off Little Creek Road.

You have to understand what that meant for me. I grew up on a few hundred acres in Kansas that my family took care of and never owned. We were the caretakers. It was always somebody else's ground.

And here I was signing thirty years' worth of paper on a piece of ground that was actually ours.

The meeting

A year or so later the Navy needed an answer: reenlist, or get out. I waited until the last minute, because I had no idea how we'd pay the bills if I left.

I'd been thinking about real estate. The agent who'd helped us buy that house offered to sit down with me, and he laid it out plain: go to school, get your license, and when you have it, come see me.

Where did he pick to meet?

A restaurant. Off Little Creek Road.

I got my license that January and did exactly what he said.

It named my dog. It held my first deed. It launched my career.

We've lived in Virginia Beach for years now. It's home, and I sell houses in all seven cities.

But I still can't drive past that exit without grinning.

Every city has streets. But if you've lived somewhere long enough, really lived there, not just resided, you've got a road like mine. One that keeps showing up at the turning points like it's in on the plan.

Hampton Roads, I know you've got one.