It's been over a month since I last attempted to blog. Not only has time been a crunch, but there have been things at work and home that weren't
bad, but nevertheless a lot of possibilities were in my head and they were things I didn't want to talk to anybody about.
I HAVE wanted to detail my trip to Washington and Baltimore. I started writing about the trip en route, but after my stopover in the mountains of Virginia I re-entered civilization and when that happens, the time and mindframe to sit around blogging fall off.
Before I checked out of the B&B, I went to the nearby gristmill (Mabry's Mill) and took pictures. I was worried I might be among crowds -- there were signs to direct freaking bus parking, since it's the most photographed site on the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway) but I guess I got there early enough, since it was just me and the ducks.
There's only so much mountain scenery you can appreciate after awhile, if you're trying to get somewhere. I told Gina I would be there around 7 or 8 that evening, and so I needed to keep going with only a few stops. I had some good pics from the day before, and I enjoyed seeing the mountains in the periphery, so I just listened to Neko Case and my Anne of Green Gables book on tape (shut up!) and drove on.
In northern Virginia, the BRMP becomes Skyline Drive, running through the Shenandoah National Park. When I got to the entrance of the park, I discovered there was $14 entry fee, even if you were just driving on the parkway. Fine. I hadn't come that far to quit just then, although once I got going I sort of semi-regretted it, since the speed limit was lower, the road was curvier, and there were signs announcing things like "Road Construction Next 30 miles". (Luckily, the alleged warnings of construction was overblown, although there were, indeed, a number of minor pavement jobs along the 30-mile stretch as promised.)
Cruelly, as I tried to speed along at a harmless 20 mph over the speed limit, I spotted a police officer (also as promised by the signs at the park entrance). He seemed a bit apalled by my speed but he couldn't turn it around in the middle of a hairpin curve, so I slowed down and hoped he wouldn't radio anyone else to look for my car. What were the odds of running into another officer anyway? Just to show me up, another police car appeared right then. By then I was moving along at maybe 10 mph over. Clearly, I was going to have to take it down a notch to shield myself from the cold karma of Skyline Drive. Reluctantly, I took it down to 5 mph over and tried to stay there for the rest of the trip. Until that moment, it was like being in one of those movies where someone in Tuscany drives along treacherous curves lining enormous backdrops to the sea, speeding along at about 100 mph in a convertible. (Minus the nice car and Italian clothes, of course.)
Skyline Drive boasted a much higher incidence of hippies, motorcyclists and Mennonites stopped in the middle of the road to enjoy the scenery. I can appreciate that, but I had to get to Fort Meade eventually. The Mennonites looked at me speeding by, clearly thinking, "Why would anyone pay to drive on this road and not slow down to enjoy it?" I looked back at them and thought, "I enjoy eating your various baked goods, but don't judge me. I have places to be."
Finally, I came across a mainstream-looking road promising it led toward D.C. It was working on 6 p.m. Due to the direction of my approach, I knew I would have to get on the Beltway eventually. I also knew I had to get off this flippin' road. The time for recreational motoring was past. It was time to show up at my ultimate destination.
So I got off the Skyline parkway and onto the road to Washington, thinking, "Well, this will be a more straightforward route to get to the Beltway." But for a few minutes, I was afraid I'd made a serious miscalculation. It was the curviest freaking road I've ever encountered. S-curve after deep s-curve. The possibilities of whiplash and permanently damaging my powertrain seemed quite real.
Finally, the road cut me a break and straightened out, and I made decent haste toward D.C. I held my breath on the Beltway, but the traffic and I moved along pretty smoothly -- for awhile. I didn't get off that easy. Why should the Beltway be any different than it is all the rest of the time, just because I was passing through? I was stopped probably a total of thirty minutes if you tallied it all up.
Once I was finally near Fort Meade, I texted Gina. My cell phone service had been highly variable until then, and I was running low on battery power. That's when my phone charger decided it was dunzo and wasn't going to work anymore. The phone took its last breath just before I took the exit for Fort Meade.
On the base, I went through the car search and headed to Gina's, which is when I noticed that the directions I printed off led me to her building but not her specific apartment. So, marooned in the parking lot of her barracks, this is where I stood:
1. Number of Gina's apartment -- Negative.
2. Working cell phone -- Negative.
3. Way to charge cell phone -- negative.
Inside her building, I tried different outlets in the hallways to try to charge my phone. The charger was flatly not working. Finally, crouched in the laundry room on the second floor, I got the charger to work and called Gina, only to have it short out again and die just after I said "Hello".
The situation was becoming serious. I considered going through the hallways shouting Gina's name, or yelling for her in the parking lot. I'm glad I didn't follow through with this plan because, once I finally got a charge and made contact with Gina, it turned out she wasn't even on the base. Whew. If my phone had been freaking working I probably would have known this well in advance. It started charging again and, interestingly enough, has worked just fine ever since. I guess it was just important for me to be utterly stranded at that crucial moment in time, and once that happened, life could proceed normally again.
I met up with Gina and her friends at a restaurant in a mall packed like there was no tomorrow. I had to park a country mile away from the actual restaurant, it was so saturated with people and cars. The rest of that evening went pretty quietly, though Gina did have to buy a sleeping bag since I forgot mine (sorry, Gina) and that, at 10 p.m., was a race against time.
The next day we went to Baltimore and checked in at the Hyatt (I love my friends who will happily say "fuck it" and spring for overpriced hotels and other outrageous items with a minimum of discussion). By then it was raining, but we went undeterred to the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the harbor. That exhibit was one of those things that would be a total ripoff if the exhibits were phony and made of plastic, but the fact that they're real is moderately distressing, so you can't decide whether you actually would have rather been ripped off in the end. We went around and looked at the dead taxidermied bodies (a few too many nervous-system exhibits for my tastes, thanks, but overall the whole thing was pretty good).
The natural follow-up to this was sushi (I'm sure you were thinking just that). We had the most awesome sushi at Edo, a place on the harbor. There isn't too much to say about good sushi -- like that little girl in the nursery rhymes, when it's good it's very, very good, and when it's bad, it's horrid. This, as it were, was very, very good.
Later that night, we ventured out to what was my first (and possibly last) professional baseball game. Now, I say "possibly last" not because I didn't have a good time -- it was actually extremely fun and enjoyable -- but because I tend to gravitate toward obscure European sports not of the ball-and-stick variety. My favorite spectator sport is tennis. I like soccer (the only team sport I mildly enjoy). Something labeled "the American pastime" and played out in a cluster of team members is unlikely to get too much of my money. I mean, I've never even been to a pro tennis or soccer match, and I FOLLOW those sports. It's nothing personal.
Anyway, this was Orioles v. Red Sox. I hadn'g really thought about Boston being in relatively close proximity to Baltimore, but that hit home when we saw how many Red Sox fans were all over the place. Gina was wearing an Orioles shirt and I thought we might not make it out of the hotel alive. I feel a little fanaticism goes a long way (though soccer has the most fanatics of all, which I readily admit. I mean, it's not THAT great.)
The post-game celebrations were fun -- we tried to crowd into a little bar near the stadium called the Pickle, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth a crushed chest cavity and settled outside, where beer was being vended and things were hopping just fine. Gina's friend Liz Paul (sp?) came with us and we dumped the army boys at the stadium. A fine time was had by all.
The next day, it was on to D.C. This was sort of one of the moments I'd been waiting for, having had no real expectations for what would happen in Baltimore. D.C. is more straightforward -- you go to some monuments, you soak up some history, yada yada. We parked the car (I made Gina drive my car everywhere, as I was still worn from my Skyline Drive experience) and took the train in.
Well, that's when things started to go a little bit off-track (pun intended). We did a changeover with no problem, but as the metro pulled into Smithsonian Station, the train lurched to a halt and the lights went out. Surely just a temporary glitch, right? We waited, and waited. Lights still out. Then, suddenly, some worker was evacuating us off the train. We'd been sitting in the back and had to walk through the whole train to get out in the front part that had made it into the station before the sudden halt.
The station was closed and we got herded again out onto the street. Word spread that our train hit someone. We hung around for a little bit, but having lost an hour of our Washington time, eventually we wandered on to the Vietnam War Memorial. Gina got sketches of three of her father's friends, and I got one of my Aunt's, the man whose MIA/POW bracelet she wore. (Still MIA.)
We tried to get to the National Zoo to see the pandas, but thanks to the whole subway debacle, we got there just as the panda exhibit closed. Pfft. We decided to eat and call it a day, since we'd spent so much time shlepping around by that point. We ate at a trattoria (sp?) and the wine was excellent.
The next day was the trip back home, uneventful for the most part. I made it on one tank of gas and when I got out of the car at my apartment, the sound of the cicadas -- which had not been in effect when I left -- hit me like a punch in the face. It was my welcome-home chorus.
Two weeks later, our annual convention rolled around, followed by an even worse week (for me) of programming during the busiest time of the year. It was awful. Not that any of it went so badly, it's just old and tired and always draining no matter how old-hat it is. I was a nervous wreck by the time it was all over.
Summer brought with it a mini buying-frenzy. The most significant item I got was a small cube fridge I'm planning to use as a freezer. Eventually. Right now, it's refrigerating away. It's an energy-star model on the extreme low end of that yellow energy sticker on every appliance, and much quieter than my old dying-lion fridge, which is sulking in its same old place. I'm hoping to freeze some veggies for winter, though I hate to make any promises on that one.
I also signed up for cable -- temporarily. I missed Wimbledon last year and it really pissed me off; it would be too depressing to miss it a second consecutive year. I'm planning to keep the service through Labor Day weekend so I can watch the summer Olympics and U.S. Open.
Most significantly, I started a new book-length work. The trip through Virginia was a big part of it; I already had the story, but the trip brought it into perspective. We'll see what happens. All I want is it to be something I would want to read. Again, it's one of those things I really don't want to run on about at the moment.
I'll try to keep up better here, though the book is admittedly getting a lot of my attention and energy when it comes to writing. A new collaboration may be in order. Nothing, at this point, is set in stone.
'Til next time ....
