When I lived in Holly Springs, my assigned polling place was Holly Springs Elementary School, less than a mile away from home. The first time I voted there, I made the mistake of driving, only to find out that voters were not allowed to park in the school’s parking lots. Along with a number of other people, I ended up parking on the side of a residential street in the subdivision across the road from the school (which I’m sure was not popular with the people who lived there).

After that, I made a point of walking to the school on Election Day. Google Maps says that it’s a 19-minute walk, but it probably took me a bit longer than that to get there on foot, because the path to the school is almost all uphill. (And downhill on the walk home, so I probably did that more quickly.) I didn’t mind the distance, because it was always a pleasant walk. I lived in Holly Springs for 18 years, and in all that time, it didn’t rain on Election Day even once, and the temperature never required more than a light jacket.

When I moved to Cary in 2016, that required a change polling place. My new voter registration card indicated that I would be voting at Glenaire, which is a retirement home not too far away. But it was a longer walk than before, and I wasn’t very familiar with this part of Cary yet, so I decided to try driving and see how it worked out. Fortunately, Glenaire has plenty of parking, and voters were not prohibited from using it. So I continued driving there on Election Day.

But now it’s 2020, the Year of the Pandemic, and inviting a large number of strangers into a retirement home does not seem like a good idea. So I was not at all surprised to receive a new voter registration card in the mail, directing me to a different polling place. The new location is Cary Presbyterian Church, which is actually closer than Glenaire. It’s a four-minute drive, but the walk is only 17 minutes, mostly along the Higgins Greenway walking trail.

That sounds even more pleasant than my walk in Holly Springs. I’m actually looking forward to it. I just hope the weather is nice.