Friday, February 20, 2015

Valentine's Day!

New Orleans’s loss was my gain last weekend, as after the meatball’s plans to go to Mardi Gras in the Big Easy fell through, she decided to come slum it with me in the Mid-Atlantic. Naturally since it was Valentine’s Day on Saturday, we had many romantic things planned for the weekend – starting with eating, progressing to more eating, and finishing with even more eating. We did take a break long enough to fulfill our outdoor activities quota, though!

Gina arrived in Baltimore Thursday night after a long drive from Columbia; she’s now halfway to evening up our dedicationometer after my two treks to South Carolina by car this year. We went grocery shopping, as we always do on our visits, at Target and made dinner in the house. Rigatoni with vodka sauce and parmesan with some chicken strips and bacon mixed in, garlic bread, and pita chips with roasted red pepper and feta cheese dip. 

She then, in her cute way, fell asleep on the couch while we watched Michigan suffer yet another heartbreaking loss in overtime at Illinois, managing to pry defeat from the jaws of victory by collapsing at the end of regulation against the Fighting Illini. After seeing Michigan win both of the first two games I went to in person, the Wolverines are now 0-3 in contests I’ve either attended or watched with Gina. Clearly an ominous sign for our relationship.

We met at my office for lunch on Friday, enjoying the remainder of our crackers and dip from the night before and winning admiring looks and stares from a couple co-workers, who bombarded me with questions and comments after we finished and I made my way back up to my desk. “Was that THE Gina?” “She’s SO cute Michael.” “Would it have been creepy if we came and said hi?” Yes, I know, and maybe, if you would’ve attacked her the same way you did to me five seconds ago.

We went out for dinner that evening, at the delicious Annabel Lee Tavern close to my house. Hint: if it’s Friday night and you didn’t make a reservation, there’s no chance you’re getting in, as we had found out a couple times previously. We had, though, also eaten there once before, and it was just as satisfying this time around. We started off with a mountainous plate of BBQ chicken and applewood smoked bacon nachos, so big that it wound up being boxed and finished by me for lunch earlier this week, before moving onto our respective main courses: roasted duck with poached eggs and Cajun hollandaise sauce over grits for Gina, and a nice, solid crab cake with mashed potatoes and seasoned asparagus for me. We did what damage we could, and I was more than happy to finish those leftovers this week as well.

Mouth is watering just posting this.

After being truly, deeply touched by Gina’s Valentine’s Day gift on Friday night, which included the most thoughtful and loving objects to set the five senses alight, we drove our separate cars back down to Fredericksburg Saturday morning for a quick pit stop at my house before setting out together once again. We made our way westward (though not quite as far west as we will in July. The panicking and hyperventilating that will result from desperate attempts to take pictures, mental notes, and blog after that trip makes my body seize up even now), heading for our second national park in as many weeks.

We’d visited Congaree National Park in South Carolina recently, and it had inspired a quest. There are 59 protected areas in[1] the United States run by the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior that have been established as national parks for their natural beauty, unique geological features, unusual ecosystems, and recreational opportunities, and our new goal is to visit all of them. We’ve already been to a good handful of them on our own, though I know I don’t really remember trips when I was very young to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Sequoia National Park in California, and the Badlands of South Dakota, amongst others, so I’d like to start from scratch and do them all.

There are not many national parks that are conveniently located for East Coasters like us; the vast majority of them are in or west of the Rocky Mountains, so we needed to seize an opportunity that had presented itself. Shenandoah National Park is just a couple hours from my house in Fredericksburg, and though it was far too cold on this February Saturday to do any hiking, Skyline Drive runs for 105 miles down the spine of the park in the Blue Ridge Mountains and was calling our names, begging to be driven on at nothing exceeding 35 miles per hour.

It was an adventure in itself just to get out there. We were bogged down by traffic in Culpeper, just thirty miles from Fredericksburg but a world apart. Who knew Culpeper was so lively? Then, after needing lunch and gas but being far too stubborn and childish to stop in Culpeper, I decided to drive onwards, figuring we could stop in Sperryville because it looked fairly decent-sized on the map. Let me tell you, it is not. Certainly it is bigger than Woodville, which we drove in and out of faster than Usain Bolt runs the 100 meters. If a town has one line written about it on Wikipedia, that’s all you need to know about it. Sperryville is unique. There was literally not a single gas station, which begs the question where its 342 residents fuel up their cars. Yet, every other edifice on its streets was an art gallery or antique shop, begging another question, who exactly buys any of those things? There was a mixture of gravel and paved roads, no surprise for a small town, until you consider that there were no automobiles in sight. Gina spotted a peasant simply trudging through the middle of an empty field. I spotted a vending machine just on the side of the road that had to predate the 1960s. It was the oddest little town, one without petrol, so frustratingly I had to admit I was wrong and we drove on.

We then stopped in Luray, where I knew there would be gas and food because I had actually been there before, having gone on several school field trips as a youngster to the tourist trap that is Luray Caverns. Stalactites and stalagmites, anyone? We pulled into a gas station there, where having been so flustered by our experience in Sperryville, I drove up to what was, unbeknownst to me, a pump that only emitted diesel. If it wasn’t for the kind, rednecky soul in a small pickup truck at the pump next to ours, I would’ve injected my little Toyota Camry with a fuel that would’ve ruined its system and set me back hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Thank you, sir.

Finally, after making it to Shenandoah, we set out on the 35-mile stretch of Skyline Drive that was most convenient for us to get back to Fredericksburg. We drove from Thornton Gap to Swift Run, pulling off at lookout points every couple of miles to soak in the cold mountain air, enjoy the views from 3500 feet up, and get the best pictures for Instagram. Skyline Drive, and the larger Blue Ridge Parkway that runs through North Carolina and Virginia, is very well known and highly-traveled during the fall, when the leaves change and the foliage is colored brilliantly. In February, though, it was nearly empty, and that was perfect for us. Snow covered some areas on the ground and icicles had formed over the carved parts of the mountain that had been either tunneled through or exposed to construct the road running through it. The sight of the valleys below was something to behold.

View from above

I had wanted to visit Shenandoah since reading A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson’s memoirs of hiking the Appalachian Trail with his childhood friend from Iowa. I’ve been on a Bryson kick since last fall, devouring his travel writing from his exploits in Europe and the United States and it pleased me to no end to come across some of the same places he wrote about during his time in Shenandoah.

We spent a couple hours in the park, which we had been delighted to enter for free since it was Presidents’ Day weekend and the National Park Service wasn’t charging admission to enter its federal lands. On the way home, Gina was her most patient self, indulging me on a stop at Madison County High School, the opponent in my first ever varsity soccer game and somewhere I hadn’t been in over a decade. It didn’t look exactly as I had remembered it, and we drove around both the high school’s football stadium and an open space outside of the local middle school trying to jog some memories. In conclusion, after many minutes later and what surely was constant angry hair-pulling from Gina, I still can’t be exactly sure where we played but I was fairly confident it was actually at the middle school.

That night, since it actually was Valentine’s Day and I felt I should at least try to be romantic, we went to dinner at Brock's, a restaurant on the banks of the Rappahannock River in downtown Fredericksburg. There we dined in style, next to a table of 8 or 10 high school girls all dolled up, with fancy dresses and full makeup and heels, with literally nowhere to go unless their daddies came to pick them up and drive them somewhere else. Gina enjoyed a house salad and a glass of red wine to start, with a fish special for dinner that unfortunately I cannot remember the name of because our waitress may very well have been high when she recited its description and laughed in that ever-so-charming fake way as she did so, and I had chicken tortilla soup and a mediocre seafood carbonara pasta dish. I was a bit disappointed, in all honesty, though we did salvage the night by taking an excellent selfie to commemorate the occasion and stopping at Wegmans on the way home for chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

Aw, look at us.

Sunday morning, we laid on the couch and watched the Nat Geo channel on TV for several hours. Never in my life had I learned so much about cats of prey. Fascinating creatures, honestly. Of course we had to eat, so we had brunch at IHOP, alongside what apparently was the rest of Fredericksburg’s population. I couldn’t believe how packed it was. There was a 20-minute wait to just to get a table. At IHOP!! And like idiots, we couldn’t even use the coupon I brought because it explicitly said valid Monday-Friday only on it, a slight oversight on the part of the two people who read over the coupon multiple times but only read the small print about getting a free meal under $9 if you bought another meal and two drinks. Sigh.

So that was our Valentine’s weekend. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself, but I’m looking forward to even more fun adventures next weekend when we go back to our New Jersey roots. More then.


[1] Well, this includes parks in American Samoa, a US territory in the middle of the South Pacific; and the US Virgin Islands, a group of islands in the Caribbean not far from Puerto Rico.