Hello Everyone, another week has come and gone here in Washington. Rains have brought cooler temperatures and I’ve been out taking lots of photos and hanging out with my favorite two year old. It’s been a fast week – they just seem to be speeding up on me. I guess routine will do that to a person. I’ve been very spoiled in my life to usually be doing so much over the course of a week that they often stretch out and feel longer than they are. Now the opposite seems true. I’m still happy to be healthy and safe and home with my people. It’s not a bad place to be or a bad group to be with, I just wish I knew there was an end date to all of this so I could make some concrete plans. Sometimes I find myself making travel plans just to be making travel plans because it’s something I’m used to doing. I guess that’s not a bad thing and it keeps me in practice. I’ve been reading Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing this week and have been enjoying it. It came recommended by two of my friends so I thought I’d give it a go. I don’t usually read a lot of fiction because there’s so much great non-fiction in the world, but this book is pretty quiet and reminds me of some of the beautiful places I’ve visited in coastal Carolina. It’s been a nice break. A few nice walks in the park as well have made it a pretty good week.
I’ve had a couple of nice days enjoying some time with Mason, my friends’ two year old son who I wrote about last week. I’m watching him a couple of times a week and really having fun with it. He’s a really sweet little boy and I love to see him laugh and smile and make connections in his head. We play with his trucks and read books together and when the sun is out we can go for a walk or a bike ride. He’s brought me a lot of joy over the last few weeks and reminds me that while the past is past, the future is yet to be written. I hope his will be a bright one in a healthy world and a country which celebrates its differences instead of destroys itself over them. At one point last week, the sun was shining in the back room where we play and he looked up and started catching things. I thought he was just playing, but soon realized that he was going after tiny strands of the dog’s hair which were floating in the afternoon sun. I couldn’t help but think what a magical world this is through his eyes. Spending time with him is special and will probably end up being the best part of this pandemic.
Friday we did our usual rounds to the grocery store and whatever other errands we needed to run for the week. That night we gathered to celebrate some wonderful Washington D.C. traditions. We had some half-smokes (traditional D.C. half pork – half beef sausages) with a chili sauce I tried to copy from Ben’s Chili Bowl, a local institution. We had some mambo wings – using sweet and tangy mambo sauce, another D.C. tradition. We listened to the sounds of Chuck Brown and Experience Unlimited and others who made our local gogo style of music, which never spread too far outside the beltway. We listened to others too, from Duke Ellington to Marvin Gaye to Fugazi and back again, which have brought our local musical talent to the masses. Friends have been sending me some things to help enhance our parties from all over the country, and it was fun to incorporate some into our weekly celebration.
The rest of the weekend was pretty quiet. As I mentioned, we got some rain which has cooled things off, and that kept me home to catch up on some work and some reading and writing. It was nice to have a relaxed weekend.
Monday my mom and I went for a drive around town. I wanted to take some sunny day photos of The Maples, one of D.C.’s oldest homes which I wrote a post on this week in my ongoing series. We had a beautiful day for it. I also wanted to catch some more shots of some of our historic firehouses for another post which I’ll definitely finish up in the next couple of days. We stopped and grabbed a couple of “G-Man” Italian sandwiches at Mangialardo’s on Pennsylvania Avenue and took them to eat in Lincoln Park. It was quite a treat and nice to be able to eat outside in the middle of the day. Taking a roundabout way home, we stumbled on the O Street Market, a historic D.C. food market which I’ve never seen or heard of before. It’s always fun to make a new discovery, especially in a city I know so well. In the normal scope of things, I take the same routes through the city – they are fast and I don’t have to think too much to drive them and can focus on the plethora of bad drivers making bad decisions as I go. But since things are quieter and we really have no place we have to be and all day to get there, we’ve been taking the roads less traveled. It’s been really fun to rediscover my own hometown.
Yesterday we headed up the road to Northern Maryland to follow the Old Main Streets Scenic Byway from Emmitsburg to Thurmont. The byway took us in one big loop taking in charming small towns with revitalized Main Streets and some beautiful, rolling farmland as well. We started in Thurmont where we checked out the Roddy Road covered bridge – the smallest of the 6 standing covered bridges in the state. Then we headed up to Emmitsburg to visit the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. This is an interesting spot which creates a replica of the Lourdes Grotto in France, where an apparition of the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared in 1858. It is an interesting pilgrimage spot and a very peaceful place to visit. From there we went to see the Seton Shrine, a tribute to Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American Saint. It was quite a beautiful building. From there we were off and running. We enjoyed the Main Street sections of Emmitsburg and Taneytown and some of the great historic buildings in both. We kept on going to New Windsor, a charming little town of 1400 with wonderful Victorian homes and unbelievably narrow streets. We stopped there and grabbed a sandwich and ate in their tiny town park. From there we continued on through Union Bridge, Keymar, Detour and Graceham before cruising back into Thurmont and heading for home. It was a pleasant day of small-town Americana, and a beautiful sunny day to enjoy it. I’ll write a full post about the day with lots of photos before next week.
And that’s about what’s been happening this week. Tonight we’ve got Dinner and a Movie and we’re going to watch one of my favorite old cartoons from when I was a kid: The Secret of Nimh. Tomorrow we’ve got a beer that we brewed ready to bottle which should be fun, and another set to start brewing here soon. We’re going to get an Oktoberfest going next so that it will be ready for, well, Oktoberfest. This weekend we’re going to head to the County Fair – not in the real world but in the make-believe world in our basement as we continue to try and recreate as best we can the experiences we are missing out on through this pandemic. Next week I hope we can get up to Baltimore to do some exploring up there. Other than that, I’ve just been trying to keep moving forward and keep my spirits up. I hope y’all are keeping well out there, wherever you are. Stay safe and stay healthy and have a great week. We’ll see you right back here at the end of August (and by that I mean next week)!
Thanks for reading,
-Mike