Day: July 7, 2009

6 July. Five pictures from my Washington DC trip.

My flight didn’t leave until 5:30 pm and Sara nicely offered to drive me to the airport which meant we had time to do a bit more sightseeing. Jess came along too. We took a trip to Oxon Hill Farm where we wandered a bit and had a chance to take this senior portrait.
Here we are violating the rule “don’t touch any farm animals.” I thought it was a dumb rule.
Post farm, we drove into Baltimore because Jess heard that the Pizza was quite good at BOP Brick Oven Pizza. It was, but you know what else was good? The gelato shop down the street. I’ve not had gelato before–figuring that if you can have ice cream, why have gelato? Today I found my answer. It was de-lic-ious! Pitango gelato. Go there if you can. I had chocolate noir and creme fraishe which I recommend.
While in the gelato shop Sara saw a woman with a great hat. As we wandered through the shopping area I spied the very same hat in a hat store. We went in to look at the various great hats and chatted with the clerk, who was much nicer than the clerk in the clothes shop down the street who ignored us, which is why I don’t like to go into fancy clothes shops, aside from the fact that they don’t make clothing in my size. Anyway, this clerk was quite friendly and Sara bought a hat. “Would you like to wear it,” he asked, “so others can see it and come in here just as you did?” he asked. She said yes and she did.

On our way to the airport, we saw this billboard. I really liked what I saw of Baltimore and I would like to explore it more someday.
Because my navigation skills are good, but not superb, we got to drive through a good chunk of Baltimore. This was okay in my book because I wasn’t really excited about getting to the airport. We also got to play Sara’s “identify the denomination of the church” game which I’m not so good at, but is fun. We eventually got to the airport and posed for one last picture, with Sara in her new hat. Fetching, isn’t it?
I then entered the hell of airports, as evidenced by this incident. I was waiting in a line that was not moving and witnessed a woman in an American Airlines uniform, with an American Airlines lanyard and American Airlines ID tell a man, “I would love to help you, but I don’t work for American Airlines.”

I hate airlines.

So if someone could get to work on that transponder, I would be ever so happy.

Minus the airplanes it was a great trip. I came home proud to be an American.

6 July 2008. A picture from the Hungary/Romania trip.

We started the day with church, and everyone looking so nice. Oh wait! I just glanced at my photos and I see the embroidery at the church is red, not blue as mentioned in earlier posts. I made the mistake because the church is primarily painted blue. At any rate, the church is small, and I think we doubled the size of the congregation that day. Eva said it was summer and a lot of people were working in the fields.

After church, eating (again–we were quite well fed) and some resting, we set out for the swimming hole. It was a bit of a walk, in the US we probably would have driven. But we made it. The swimming hole was very small, more of a large hot tub size with boards built all around it. The mineral content of the water was supposed to be healing. It was kind of a breezy day, so none of our youth went in. Some of us did however, enjoy the mud hole. Dana, Eva and I wandered in and I muddied up my arms, to help with the psoriasis. Then Brittany arrived and put us all to shame. There is a picture after this one where even her hair is covered in mud.
Now think of getting all that mud off. There was no faucet, just a trickle from a stream. It took me a bit of time to wash all the mud away, but it took Brittany quite a long time. She was happy though.

Another thing to notice in this picture is the decoration on the posts around the mud hole. I like how everything, no matter how mundane is decorated. It makes so many nice places to rest your eye.

In the evening we had a campfire and sang songs.