Staunton: They actually want to make it harder to get around downtown?

Folks in Staunton aren’t sure about plans for downtown traffic that will make it harder to drive through and to find parking spaces, but I’m going to write about a today difficulty with downtown.

We had friends in town, and they wanted to try a downtown restaurant, Remedy Burger, so we all made the drive to the Queen City today for lunch, which was great, by the way.

Not so great: the difficulty finding parking, and the, it seems to me, nonsensical arrangement that has the West Beverley Street closed off to allow restaurants to set up seating on the streets.

Second issue first: the temperatures were in the upper 80s at lunchtime, with the real feel near 100.

Yeah, go ahead, seat me outside in that, right?

I can see the dine outside gimmick working in April and May, even early June, and then in September, October, maybe into the first week or two of November.

The dog days of August?

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ICYMI

• Staunton: Business owners share concerns about proposed downtown project

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That issue bleeds into the first, parking.

We tried the public lot at the corner of the Dixie Theatre and Blackfriars Playhouse, which actually had several open spaces.

They were open because there were signs noting a “police order: no parking.”

Huh, whuh?

We drove around for a while, then walked several blocks to get to the burger spot.

Did I mention that it feels like it’s 100 degrees out today?

The food at Remedy Burger, top-notch – great smash burger, great homestyle fries, cooked to perfection.

I don’t see myself driving 20 minutes on the interstate, another 20 trying to find a parking spot and walking on baked pavement, to do that again anytime soon.

And on top of this, now the city wants to make it harder to get around downtown?

I don’t get it.