Today marks a bittersweet event. I have not been on a commercial flight for
sixty-five days! That hasn’t happened
since 1980, so I really must be retired.
I must say that a part of me really misses the travel. I tend to forget
all the hassles and misery that I know was a big part of my traveling days, but
I remember with great fondness some of the really swell flights and my mind
tricks me into thinking that all of my flights were like the few good
ones. I’ll extend my record until the 29th
of September when we’ll finally begin our autumn travels in earnest. Note
from Cindy: I can verify his faulty
memory on travel issues! To Wm’s credit,
he only remembers good things and when we travel he is suddenly surprised by
all the hassles. Luckily I am good at
listening, comforting, and rolling my eyes, so we get through it pretty well.
Most of the summer has been spent right here in beautiful
Charles Town. Overall it hasn’t been a
really bad summer. We had only a few weeks of truly miserable weather but
that’s over now, and today is a day that is so beautiful it makes me sad that
I’m watching football instead of being outside playing football!
We have spent the summer tilling the land. Cindy has done the bulk of the gardening and
the grounds of the estate reflex the superwoman effort she has applied to the
task. There are flowers everywhere and
because of the beauty and variety we have been visited by lots of hummingbirds,
bees, butterflies and small colorful songbirds.
We have an abundance of tomatoes, all different varieties and colors, as
well as some decent peppers, one eggplant, tons of herbs - and after the first
frost we’ll gather our crop of sweet potatoes.
I’ve maintained the lawns and trimmed the trees, which are now already
in the early stages of turning color.
From Cindy: He undersells himself – the lawn looks great
and he has spent countless hours helping me with the posies.
We have tried to have one day a week that we call Anything Can Happen Day,
just like the Mickey Mouse Club. While it isn’t always on a Wednesday, we do
try to keep the spirit of surprise and make last minute decisions to do
something out of the ordinary. This has given us a chance to see a bit more of
our immediate surroundings, which has proved to be not only fun, but also
educational. We have had some summer
guests whom we have taken to places we haven’t been so that has been an
additional inducement to “get out of Dodge” for a day’s trip. Our most recent adventure was simply lunch in
nearby Shepherdstown where there is a relatively new French bistro that is very
good. This was our second visit so we
believe that they’re always good and our first visit wasn’t a fluke; if any of
you visit we can take you there with confidence.
Last week we took a two-day mini-vacation to Fredericksburg, VA
just to see what it was all about. Our friend Tom told us it had the best frozen
custard joint, which was also on the national register, so we went. It has a
very old central core with well-maintained buildings and lots of historical
placards, mostly about the Civil War.
Neither of us is a big fan of the Civil War so that part had no appeal,
but a river runs through it and you just have to love towns that have a river
running though them. There are tons of
B&Bs but I’m not a big fan of them since every one we have ever stayed in
is big on letting their cats and dogs rule and I am definitely not an animal
lover. Instead we dusted off some points from Marriott and stayed right
downtown in a modern, well air-conditioned building with a strict no-pet
policy.
The first order of business for us was to scout the place
out and find a good place for dinner. We
enjoyed walking around the little town, which is a funny combination of town
and gown; the University of Mary Washington is there. It looked to us like a typical university
town, with a new generation of hippies wandering around with instruments and
glazed eyes and professors with earnest expressions, grey ponytails and tablets
tucked tidily into their LL Bean daypacks. There were the normal stores that
cater to both tourist and student; one of the best was a tattoo parlor called
simply, “Sorry Mom Tattoos”. The place
was like a little bitty Portland Oregon. The first night at dinner before we
ordered we were told about a substitution, which left us speechless: “Tonight
we are out of the Mizuna lettuce and are substituting Glenburnie Farm
lettuce.” Oh dear, what to do? It hardly mattered to us. Later we had a good laugh with our waiter,
who had a wonderful sense of humor, when I asked about an item on the menu that
promised to contain only Amish eggs. I asked when chickens got religion and he
said with a straight face, “Oh, the chickens wear little bonnets.” It was that kind of place and the food was
really spectacular.
After dinner we wandered a bit before heading back to the
hotel, which was jumping. It was the first game of the NFL season and they were
offering lots of snacks and discounted drinks and there were TVs
everywhere. We found a quiet booth and
as we ordered a drink Cindy noticed that our server had a Luthier’s tattoo (an
elongated “S” shape). He was very
impressed that Cindy knew what it was; I just amazed that Luther had a
tattoo! She patiently explained to me
that a luthier makes stringed instruments, and they continued their
conversation about his experience in luthier school where he had made 18
violins, 1 viola, and 1 cello - while I contemplated the drinks menu. It was a fun evening and we were happy we
came.
The next morning after our long walk we decided that perhaps
it was a one-day town and thought about going somewhere else, but we really
couldn’t think of where to go so we decided to stay and see more of the
sights. We thought it would be a good
idea to walk over to George Washington’s boyhood home, just on the other side
of the river. On paper, this was a
stellar idea: Combine some nice walking
with a bit of history and be back in time for lunch. The walk turned out to be a bit more like a
marathon. Once we crossed the river we
ran out of sidewalks and had to walk on the side of the back road, which wasn’t
that bad until we ran out of back road and ended up on a highway with no sidewalks. The temperature had now hit 90 and the
humidity was quite high, but we slogged on taking comfort from some of the signs
on the side of the busy road that advertised things like The Greek House of
Pizza, The House of Jumbo Shrimp and Grits, and a MacDonald’s that was made to
look like an old colonial house.
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| Some stuff you just can't make up! |
We finally got to George Washington’s Boyhood Home only to
find out that it was just the grounds of his boyhood home and they wanted $17
big ones for each of us to walk though.
We demurred and decided to go back to our hotel via another bridge a bit
further up the road. Tourist maps do a
very horrible job of scale. What appeared on the map to be just a tad up the
busy road was really much farther, and then what we thought might be a quaint
bridge did not have a sidewalk. So here
are the Embees walking across a very large bridge with six lanes of traffic
going 60 miles an hour, which accounted for the only breeze as the temperature
now went well into the 90’s. We were
miserable and practically jogged the last half mile to get back to someplace
with a sidewalk.
We treated ourselves to a very lovely long lunch followed by
an equally lovely and long nap, thus refreshed for our dinner. We had made reservations at a place that is
supposed to be the best in town. The
joint was jumping when we got there, a testament I thought to the quality of
the food and the fact that it had just reopened after a short summer interlude
to remodel. We were shown to our table
and we were pleased that we had reserved since the restaurant was full. Our waiter gave us menus and then decided to
play Houdini and disappear! We waited
and waited and after about twenty minutes with not so much as a glass of water -
not to mention wine - someone appeared to take our order. Since we had had so
much time to look at the menu we knew what we wanted and listened with interest
as the waiter informed us that the two things we really wanted weren’t
available, despite the restaurant just having opened. Additionally the wines we
wanted weren’t available so we decided to make ourselves unavailable and we
simply walked out. We usually can make
the best out of any situation but it was clear to us that this wasn’t a really
good restaurant so we went right back to the place where we ate the night before
and had a splendid meal.
With best wishes,
Cindy and Wm
