Sunday – Saturday (Oct 21)
In the middle last night’s big meal, Peggy wondered aloud if we would feel like doing Sunday brunch after this big meal on Saturday night. Mark and I openly scoffed at the very idea! Brunch tomorrow is 16 hours away! Plenty of time to get hungry again!
This morning there was no doubt what the plan was, we were gonna brunch! We piled into Mark’s car and got on the inevitable US 13 and headed past all the places I’ve been the last two days to go to the local’s favorite seafood brunch at Fins Ale House and Raw Bar. It was very good.
The drive to DC was very nostalgic. We drove past the sign for Bombay Hook NWR, which I spent a few hours at on a trip here eighteen xxx years ago! The Eastern Shore is a special place. The little towns have a different feel. Hell, they think scrapple is a legitimate meat! The Bay Bridge is another engineering marvel and the extensive tidal marshland area and fishing communities leading up to it fun to drive past.
The afternoon sun was directly in my face, which was very tiring. After the bridge it was just standard urban freeway driving – zoom past Annapolis then plug into the DC Beltway, which thank god got me off the due west/setting sun track on to the counterclockwise around the city track. We drove from about 3 o’clock to 11 o’clock to exit on good ole Colesville Road, and before you know it we’re home to leafy, quiet Silver Spring (not Springs as I want to type each time).
Monday
Peggy’s at a conference all day, so I have a me day :)
I catch up on computer stuff till mid-afternoon then walk downtown Silver Spring, which a little less than a mile south. I mostly just want to get out and check stuff out, but since it’s about 3 pm, I will probabpy hit a happy hour … or two as it turns out:
- The oddly named All Set – $3.50 sliders and fish tacos, $8 beer unless you get Coors draft – the slider and taco were quite good, but the beer thing gets me moving on.
- Not far away on Colesville Road was the also oddly named Not Your Average Joe’s. It was the place I’ve been looking for! 3 sliders for $6, very good IPA for $4 – the winner! I wanted to keep exploring so I cashed out after one beer and followed Colesville on down to the Silver Spring Metro Station and kept exploring.
- Right around 6 pm found myself outside of Cubano’s, a (surprise) Cuban restaurant. The fellow was a go-getter, so he bascially came and took me off the sidewalk with the promise of a happy hour peer price anyway, so I had a $4.50 xx Negro and a watched the Cuban guys get ready for the dinner crowd.
I enjoyed my little bite-sized dose of urban energy very much.
Tueday
Home, blogging on the back porch to stay out of the way of her IT guys who were messing around with her conferencing connection. An absolutely perfect fall day here.
The neighbors come over for dinner. I of course do not remember their names, but I enjoyed them a lot.
Wednesday
Somehow end up doing nothing again. It’s sooo easy to do. Nice little sunset stroll around the neighborhood, that was the excitement for the day.
Thursday
Then there are three basement levels that deal with the dark stuff. This part you are pretty much forced to do from start to finish in sequence. A large elevator that takes 30-ish people at a time to the bottom level, where everybody gets out and walks each level and up the ramp to the surface. The dark stuff, really, really dark stuff that is probably unsettling to a white person who likes to believe that white privilege ended with the Civil Rights Act. That stuff in in a windowless setting where everyone forced (not really forced, they’ll take you back up the elevator if you need it) to experience the whole arc of bad things that got us to where we are today. So if you decide “I don’t need this crap, I’m outta here”, you have to at least walk past the rest of the crap to escape back to daylight. I think it’s a brilliant design.
At the bottom is Africa in the 1500 -1600’s, when there was trade with Europe, but the serious exploitation had not begun. Then it takes you through sugar slavery in the Caribbean and rice slavery in the Carolina lowlands, to the big one – cotton slavery in the 1800’s. They are quite clear about how the Europeans and the northern industrialists were just bystanders, rather they were well aware that their wealth and power depended on the free labor, so they were all in on it. That gets you through one level. The Civil War and Reconstruction are level 2. And you finish with Jim Crow and all the sad terrible stuff that has happened all the way up to whatever day you are reading this, as white people do what they need to do to keep control. I thought the curators did a magnificent job.
We got here by me driving her peppy little electric car to her parking garage at 13th and L, then walking down and walking back. We stopped on the way home at Kapnos, a Greek restaurant in far Northwest that she knows to have a great happy hour. No joke, it was a great happy hour! Greek food makes great appetizers.
I am getting used to the electric car and kind of like it. No warming up the engine, just push the button and drive. It’s quite peppy.
Friday
So I got her to the office, and headed out. Got breakfast at a Nerds & Nibblers (where do they get these names?) at 15th and L Street, and trudged on to the Renwick. I’ve always loved the Renwick. It’s like a little boutique museum compared to the giant buildings on the Mall. Right now they have a Burning Man exhibit. Really? I came all the way across the country for a Burning Man show? I think the display case part was the same one that originated in my very own Nevada Museum of Art, so I skipped that. They did have the rest of the second floor dedicated to a bunch of large installations with pretty lights and noises and moving parts, and a really spectacular recreation of a B Man temple, complete with the stations where you could write messages to departed loved ones.. Visitors were hushed and awed and moved just the way they are at the real temple.
Down the steps, out the door and turn right to walk around the White House on the west side, down the hill along the Old Executive Office Building. The architectural decoration on that building is so put of control… Across the street is the Corcoran Museum, a private institution not part of the Smithsonian. It has memories for me because the Federal government paid for me to take a couple of design courses there. Design 1 – black and white, Design 2 – color, and Typography 1. That was a great time in my life. Mid 20’s, the world was my oyster.
I’ve decided to stick to the small museum theme, and head to the Freer next. There’s a handful of small museums tucked into the southwest corner of the Mall, and today they appeal to me more than say, the ginormous Natural History Museum. Cut across the Ellipse, taking a few moments to look back at the White House and reflect on what a sad time this is for the country. when you can’t look at it and feel pride. Walk between the Afro-American Museum and the Washington Monument which appears to be closed for renovation.
Somewhere in the middle of the Mall I tweaked a calf muscle. Not worth mentioning except that a couple of weeks later it’s still bugging me. [update: two years later it became achilles surgery]
I’d forgotten that the Department of Agriculture main building is tucked away on that corner of the Mall. Today was Farmer’s Market day, and there was a really good band playing. I hobbled along to the music for a while. Next up was the Freer Gallery. I’d forgotten everything about it, but it came back to me a bit while I was there. I doubt the exhibits have changed much since I lived here forty years ago. It and the Sackler Gallery (next up) are the Asian Art galleries of the Smithsonian. The Sackler is mostly underground, which is cool, except stairs are hard in my suddenly hobbled condition.
Those galleries are right behind the Smithsonian Castle. the original building, which nowadays is a museum of Smithsonian lore. Learn all about James Smithson, for instance. It’s only 3pm, but I’m done. I text Peggy, hobble back up to 12th and L and we drive home, and I go take a long, delicious nap.
Saturday
Peggy is off to canvas for a Congressional candidate in Northern Virginia. Good for her. It’s a rainy day, perfect for hanging around the house and being domestic. I organized the van for the trip back. After she got back I did a coupla laundries, so I’m ready!
Sunday
After nine days (counting Rehoboth, and who wouldn’t?) I am so far out of the traveling habit that it’s hard to get the momentum to leave. Maybe I can just go down to her basement and watch TV forever? There’s a Niners game this afternoon and a Warriors game tonight, so why not just stay one more day? But it is TIME! I pack my clothes, remember the leftover sausage and sauerkraut in the fridge (yay!), and I’m outta here 1-ish. Now I’m glad it’s Sunday, because even today, suburban freeway traffic on the ole Rockville Pike is beastly. At one point on I-270 is eight lanes in my direction! Relatively empty lanes today, but what a nightmare it must be at rush hour. The exit signs show the old familiar names – Rockville, Gaithersburg, Frederick, Hagerstown.
Once I escape the suburbs, the Maryland countryside is quite pretty this time of year. I’ve had a couple of good times watching Sunday football at sports bars on this trip, so I try it again today. The closest one to where I want to go is the aptly named Throttles in Clear Spring. That place was pretty wild today. There were two really, really drunk guys playing hard rock hits of the 80’s really, really loud and dancing in really, really badly – cringeworthy badly. I had a beer, ate my so-so Philly cheesesteak wrap, watched the Redskins win(!) and got the heck out of there. Then it was a twenty minute drive through beautiful rolling countryside to:
WHUFU page for: Fort Frederick State Park
Overpriced campground, but a very interesting place.
The actual Fort is cool, the CCC buildings around it are cool.
We are right on the C&O Canal/bike path.
tonight:
There are trains on both sides of the campground. Amtrak is right across the river, and the river isn't very wide. On the landward side of the campground, huge freight trains follow the C&O Canal. So there is a lot of train noise.
On the other hand I saw a bald eagle, who rested in a tree directly across the river from me for 1/2 hour!
Cost is $16 + a $6.25 "transaction fee". They charge the reservation fee even if you walk in and take a site for tonight. What a crock.
The focus of this park is a very cool Revolutionary War fort with the classic star design and forbidding thick stone walls. It was restored by the good ole CCC in the 30’s. The fort was built to control the Potomac River, so on past the fort and down the hill is the river. But there’s so much history and layers of activity around here that there are more cool things before you get to the river.
Drive past the fort, down a hill, cross the C&O Canal, cross the railroad tracks. past a swampy lagoon called the Big Hole, to get to a flat, shaded island where the campsites are. I think they decided it would be too expensive to bring water and electricity down here, so there’s no lights (good) and the bathroom is a couple of porta-potties (bad). $22.25 is a lot to charge for a picnic table, a fire ring and a porta-potty.
It was a cool place though, dripping with history, from the Revolutionary Era fort to the C&O Canal, to the CCC cabins. A bald eagle flew down the river and roosted in a tree right across the river for about 40 minutes – woo!