Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds

This past weekend, Tricia and I went on a day trip to Yorktown. As you most likely know if you know her, Tricia has been in the market for a new puppy for the past few months, since she moved into her new house. Last week, she learned of a puppy that needed a new home and sounded like she would be a good fit. The only problem was that the puppy, named Kira by the shelter, lived in Yorktown, VA - on the best of days, just under 3 hours away. So off we went to Yorktown on Saturday.

Despite my worries about traffic, we decided to take 270 to the Beltway. Luckily, I was wrong, and the road wasn't crowded at all. We did see quite a few interesting sights, though, including this company that I think Ken should use the next time she moves:

We also saw a truck pulling a truck through the Mixing Bowl, which was quite unnerving:

Finally, we reached our destination, in just under 3 hours:Kira was being housed at a local kennel, but the gentleman who was in charge of the Lab Rescue group in the area had brought her to his house to let her run around with his dogs. Kira greeted us at the fence as soon as we walked up, and was very eager to meet Tricia:
Kira looks to be a mix of Golden Retriever and Yellow Lab, and is a gorgeous color that the Lab Rescue guy called fox red. She's very svelte, and has a white spot on her chest that makes it look like cleavage.

She also has a beautiful smile,

and likes to pose for the camera.
I'm convinced she is a supermodel.

Kira decided that she liked Tricia, and wanted to live in Maryland, so we put her in the car and started the ride back.

It was on the ride back that Tricia officially changed her name to Lucy, which is a far better name than Kira, who was one of Barbie's friends. It's reminiscent of old sitcoms, loose seals, and other delightful things. Lucy seemed to take to it well.

Before we drove too far, we made a pit stop at the Williamsburg Winery. Lucy needed a drink,

and so did Aunt Leah.

Much happier, we set off for dinner.

Tricia and her fine observational skills spotted a Sonic off the side of 64, and the trusty GPS got us there despite having passed the exit.

For those of you who never been, Sonic is a glorious drive-up restaurant where you order food at an intercom, and then a lovely person on roller skates delivers it to your car. So in addition to being awesome, it was very convenient for two people traveling with a dog who didn't want to leave her in the car, but also didn't want to eat and drive at the same time. A win-win-win situation!

And best of all - they have tater tots!

Truer words than these have never been spoken:

And just as awesome is their dessert, including the creamslush, which is a combination of ice and ice cream and flavoring. Despite what Tricia tells you, watermelon and lime combine with the creamslush to make a glorious experience.
Having fortified ourselves, we set off for the ride home, which was uneventful and pictureless, as it soon got dark and boring. But stay tuned on Facebook for more pictures!

Meet Virginia: Day Three

If you're looking for Day Three of our visit to Williamsburg, it's not here - you have to go visit Taryn's blog to find it. Have fun!

(And if you're just joining us now, start at the beginning here.)

On a related note, while we were gone, Holly and McKenna got to be quite good friends. Holly even let her join the Backyard Groundhog Patrol as an Honorary Deputy.

Meet Virginia, Day Two

***For Meet Virginia, Day One, click here***

Day 2 started bright and early with a trip to my new favorite place, the Williamsburg Winery.
All the times that I’ve been to Williamsburg and had their wine, I had never been to the winery itself. Clearly, I was stupid, as it was awesome. We found a deal online where you could do the tour and tasting, as well as lunch at the adjacent restaurant, for a very reasonable price – I would highly recommend this option to anyone heading to the area!

The tour took us through the winecellars, where we saw a number of wine barrels.

The tour guide told us that these wine barrels, which are very expensive, can only be used four times before they have to be discarded. To try to recoup the cost, the winery sells the old barrels to various places, including Colonial Williamsburg, to be used as trash cans. Until then, though, they are put to good use. This one was making Merlot:

Next, the tour took us past the room where the wine is bottled (the tour guide thought that this was their blackberry dessert wine being bottled here),and into a room which displayed a number of wine-related antiques, including old bottles that lined the display cases.Finally, we arrived at the tasting room, where we tasted six of the wines that were availableout of our pretty souvenir glasses (because that’s what I needed – another wine glass!).After the tasting, we headed over to the restaurant for lunch.They seated us on the outside patio,and soon, lunch was served, including this gorgeous cheese platter that Taryn ordered.

After lunch, we headed back inside to the gift shop to make our wine purchases. The winery gave a discount if you purchased more than 12 bottles of wine, so we decided it was only polite to take advantage of this generous offer.On the way out of the winery, we stumbled over something quite surprising – our foreign friends from Sunday, the ones from the first plantation, had followed us to the winery and were heading in as we were heading out. Luckily, no one used any racial epithets this time, and we were not there to watch them harass yet another young female tour guide. We can only imagine that it would have been worse here, as there was alcohol to fuel their interrogation.

After we left the winery, we headed over to Jamestown, where Taryn had never been. For those of you who haven’t been there before, this is the site of the first permanent English settlement in America, and it’s still actively being preserved by archaeologists. A good deal of the site has been identified or reproduced already, including the remains of a tavern,a church,and a fort.The site is right on the James River, and still has a great view (which I'm sure was foremost in the mind of the starving, freezing colonists).They also have a very 70’s-looking museum that displays some of the artifacts they’ve unearthed, and other historical information. And also air conditioning. We were ready for air conditioning by then.

After Jamestown, we went for a quick drive around the Yorktown Battlefield, stopping at the most photogenic sites, including British redoubts (now helpfully protected by a chain link fence so you can’t impale yourself on the spikes),cannons,and an old house called the Moore House, which was the site of surrender negotiations in 1781.

To finish the day, we headed to Colonial Williamsburg. We shopped for awhile, including at The Allergen Store, as I like to call it:

We also saw the reality of what happens to wine barrels when they become old and decrepit:and also, a colonial squirrel! This one is for you, Larry:

We went to dinner at the King’s Arms Tavern, or, as a work colleague of Taryn’s calls it, The King’s Armpit.Despite the nickname, the tavern ended up being a rather lovely way to end the day – any place that has champagne cocktails and wine coolers (real ones that were a lovely blend of red wine and lemon soda, not those sickening things that come in bottles) on their menu is fine by me! After dinner, we headed back to the hotel to prepare for the next day, arguably the most exciting day of them all – Busch Gardens day!

***For Meet Virginia, Day Three, click here***

Meet Virginia: Day One

So this past weekend, Taryn, Kathy and I traveled to southeastern Virginia to engage in general merriment. We left early Sunday morning. McKenna was a little confused - she's very used to being left at my house when Taryn leaves with suitcases; however, when I brought one out, she was a little freaked.
Taryn, the master packer, managed to fit all of our stuff, as well as McKenna's stuff, into my car with room to spare.
With everyone in the car, we set off for our first stop: my parents' house, where McKenna had reserved a room for the next few days. She was a bit perplexed - I'm convinced that dog can figure out the direction of the car, and knows when she's going somewhere new.
However, once we arrived and McKenna saw the size of my parents' yard as compared to mine, she brightened up a bit. According to my mother, she and Holly got along very well during her visit; they chased squirrels and flirted with the young stud next door and had a wonderful time.

Once we left McKenna, we set out through Virginia, making only short pit stops at Starbucks for breakfast and at Target to buy a new ipod radio adaptor to replace the crappy one I had, which was broken. After we got out of northern Virginia (where there was surprisingly little traffic!), we stopped at a Subway in a gas station for lunch.
This was quite an interesting place. The Subway advertised a monstrous sandwich known as "The Feast,"
and the gas station advertised plenty of "Clean Restrooms." I suppose, as opposed to dirty ones? Which, why would you advertise that? Is it implying that they're dirty if they don't use an adjective?

On the way to our hotel in Williamsburg, we stopped at a few plantations. The first, called the Shirley Plantation, was rather entertaining. The house and grounds were lovely, of course, but it was the company that made the experience what it was. First, we bought tickets in the gift shop, and learned that they had a contest to name their baby chickens. Of course, we suggested a list of Dynasty-inspired names. Hopefully they will choose our entry, and Fallon and Alexis will be running around the Shirley Plantation for years to come.
Next, we met our tour group on the steps of the main house. It was there that we met our tour guide, a knowledgeable lady close to our age. She complimented our chick name entry, so we immediately liked her. However, the poor girl had to deal with the rest of our tour group, which contained a handful of old foreign people who persisted in asking useless and/or inappropriate questions.
One such gentleman asked if the plantation had slaves. When this fact was confirmed, he proceeded to ask questions about the slaves using words that nice people do not say. Hopefully, he just was unaware of the inappropriateness of these words, as he was clearly from another culture, but either way, it did not set a nice tone. To the tour guide's credit, she did keep things moving briskly after that question.
The same group was also quite enthralled with the plastic food that was set out throughout the grounds to illustrate what colonial people ate. Now, as you all well know, I am plenty enthralled with bacon, but not to the point that I'd hold up the tour to discuss a fake version of it (which I think should be called 'facon') with the poor tour guide.
After the tour, we went outside to view the grounds. There was a lovely view of the river,
the smoke house,
other plantation animals (including a exhibitionist goat who stuck his posterior into most of my pictures),
and our personal favorite, a kid on a leash (who at one point, did a face plant walking out of a building. Don't worry, he was fine.)

After we left Shirley, we went to another James River plantation called Berkeley Plantation, the birthplace of William Henry Harrison. This plantation was also beautiful, with a huge old main house
and extensive grounds that offered lovely views of the river,
as well as some hay that we think was just there as a prop (as it was growing foliage).
There was a very informative tour of the main house, and our tour group was much larger than at Shirley. None of the people in this group used any racial slurs (accidentally or not), which was nice, although some people did have trouble following the directions not to touch anything. One room has a shawl that was said to belong to William Henry Harrison; in fact, the tour guide said that rumor has it that he used it during his last few weeks of life. Despite the fact that it was likely teeming with 200 year old germs, and that it was ancient and probably very fragile, one lady decided it was OK to touch the thing as soon as the tour guide moved on. Niiiiice.

After the tour, we wandered down to the James River.
There were a bunch of flowers along the paths that were in full bloom,
as well as one lonely, tiny, empty colonial vodka bottle that someone has graciously left to decorate the landscape.
There was also a willow tree that tried to attack Taryn.

After the vicious willow tree attack, we set off toward Williamsburg and our hotel. After checking in, we headed back out to Yorktown to see what was going on. We walked past a concert in the yard of Grace Episcopal Church,

and went to the Riverwalk to search for a place for dinner. We ended up at the Riverwalk Restaurant, which was right on the York River.

We all got various salads, which came on super cute fish-shaped plates.

After dinner, we wandered around the area, looking for places to take pictures.

It was still early when we left Yorktown, so we decided to go play miniature golf. Pirate Mini Golf was down the street from our hotel, so we headed over.

It was pretty crowded, and we ended up waiting awhile before we were able to start.

At one point, Taryn made quite an impressive hit...so impressive, in fact, that her ball went all the way off the green and down a waterfall. We had to share balls after that.

There were some interestingly designed holes...such as this one, which had two protruberances blocking the hole.

We took the game very seriously, though, lost balls and strange green bumps included.

Finally, we finished the game and retired to our hotel for the evening, to rest up for a busy Monday.

***For Meet Virginia: Day Two, click here***