Of Bed and Breakfasts

“Will ye be havin’ kippers for breakfast?” he asked. We said we would although my travelmate did have some misgivings. Kevin told us of the breakfast time and the menu as we checked into the charming bed and breakfast on Loch Alsh in Scotland. We had driven across the bridge to the Isle of Skye and had had an enjoyable afternoon discovering the back roads and interesting sights of the island earlier. We climbed the stairs to our room on the second floor. It was large and comfortable with a bay window overlooking the loch. From the window our car, a Mercedes 130, also known as “the baby Benz”, was in full view. You get kind of a secure feeling when you can see your car from your room. The bathroom nest door was huge with a claw-foot tub as well as shower. We prefer staying in bed and breakfasts when traveling for a number of reasons. First, they are usually less expensive. Secondly, you get to enjoy the company of your host. Thirdly, casual interaction with other guests and the atmosphere is much more relaxing. There is also accessibility. Frequently small villages do not have a hotel but have bed and breakfasts. This B & B in Scotland was certainly a treat.

Staying at bed and breakfasts you get to know the natives.  In Scotland we found that Kevin was a musician and showed us his collection of stringed instruments.  In Kinsale, Ireland, my travelmate had much in common with our hostess there.  They both had become widows.  Near Newcastle, our host told us,”You must visit Durham, it had the first cathedral to use flying buttresses in England.” Durham wasn’t on our list of places to see but we went there and thoroughly enjoyed the city. While in Homer, Alaska, our host regaled us with stories of stalking the mountain goats on the frozen slopes of the Alaskan mountains. We sat in front of a roaring fire with mugs of hot chocolate under the watchful eye of the mounted goats head on the wall.

The dwellings themselves are not without certain charms. One such place was the Parson’s Purse in Cody, Wyoming, which had once been a Methodist church. In Vaison la Romaine, France, our lodging had once been an olive oil producing mill. Our lodging in Vernon, France, was a three-hundred-year-old town house. It had high ceilings with antique furnishings and fixtures. The house we stayed in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, had a deck with a panoramic view of the walled city of Derry. The owner had a great display of Pinocchio memorabilia including a four-foot-tall marionette. Many of these lodgings were old and in most the heat is turned off at ten o’clock in the evening. But in the British Isles you can always depend on the ubiquitous tea pot! A spot of tea will warm you up.

We met many interesting house guests in our travels. Breakfast is the only meal usually served as the name of the lodging implies and usually all lodgers eat together. In Alaska we met a nine-year-old boy of native and Minnesotan descent who could not wait to get back to checking his trap line in the frozen North. And there was the Israeli doctor in France who had gotten a heart transplant at the Mayo Clinic and had a son in the Israeli Air Force.

As we continue our travels we will continue to utilize bed and breakfasts as our favorite means of lodging. I can’t wait to see what we can find in Spain, Italy and beyond!

Turkey Shoot

It was a cold Saturday morning in November when my daddy asked me ”How would you like to go to a turkey shoot?”


“Yessiree, I’ll be ready in a minute!” I answered.

“Just you be sure the wood box is full. We don’t want your mama goin’ out in the cold for wood,” Daddy said.

“I’ll get ‘er done,” I said as I jumped from my chair at the breakfast table.

“Y’all be careful,” Mama said. Mama always worried about something.

I hurriedly checked the wood box and got my gun from over my bedroom door. It was a single shot Iver Johnson 16 gauge shotgun Daddy had given me last year when I was eight years old. I grabbed a box of shotgun shells, and I was ready. I got my coat and cap, and I was sitting on the running board of the pick-up when Daddy got there.

Daddy drove down the red dirt road until we came to the highway which would lead us to the town of Bradley, South Carolina. I guess there wasn’t much to Bradley as for as towns go. There were two stores, a post office, a school, and about a dozen houses. It didn’t even have a caution light. The railroad went down the middle of town. Mama said when she was younger there were more stores, and people would catch the train there to go to Greenwood to work. But the train didn’t stop there any more except to get a cold Pepsi at one of the stores.

A big crowd had gathered behind the concrete block store of Cecil Thompson’s. I recognized most of the trucks and cars. Most of them were rather old and some kind of banged up. But there was one big car. Daddy said it was Mr. Mack Johnson’s Cadillac. Mr. Mack had a lot of land and several tenant farmers like us. He was also a lawyer in Greenwood. I had not seen him many times before. I remember he was at Grandpa’s funeral. We parked the truck close by and walked over to the group behind the store.

There was a low table with a rifle laying on it, and about one hundred feet away was a target nailed to a pine tree. The target was just an “X” drawn on a piece of writing paper. Daddy said that the winner would the shooter who hit the target closest to the center of the “X”. We went inside the store to look at the turkey in the cooler, and we knew that it would look good on our table come Thanksgiving. We always had a big hen for Thanksgiving dinner, and it would be nice to have turkey.

Mr. Thompson was in charge of the turkey shoot. Mama always told me to call him “Mr.” although she referred to him as “old man Thompson”. I think it had something to do with his wooden leg, and Daddy told me I would understand why she called him that when I got older. He said everybody would shoot one shot at a time and that the cost would be ten cents per shot. I felt that big half dollar in my pocket and knew that I could shoot at least five times. Mr. Thompson had figured out a way to judge the accuracy of rifle and shotgun shots equally so that the type of gun used would not be a disadvantage. The morning erupted with gunfire, and everyone was having good spirited fun. Several of the boys from school were there, and we were having our own competition among ourselves. Mr. Mack had this beautiful imported rifle with a telescopic sight on it. I had only seen one of these in the Sears-Roebuck catalog. He could really shoot it, too. Every shot would be right in the center of the “X”. I had not noticed them until now, but the Miller boys, John and Nate, were there. I looked around and sure enough that old fenderless bicycle of theirs with the patched tire was leaning up against the side of the store. Nate was the oldest, my age, but smaller and thinner than me. He was right strong though; we had wrestled before at recess. His brother was a little bigger and wore thick eyeglasses that were taped together with adhesive tape. John was carrying an old .22 rifle. It was rusty and had the barrel fastened to the stock with black electrical tape. He gave the gun to Nate and dug into his patched overalls for a dime and a bullet. The boys were dressed in ill-fitting clothes, probably hand-me-downs from some of the folks at church. Mama said that their daddy, Jimbo Miller, wasn’t anything but a drunk that spent most of the time in jail. She said she didn’t see what a nice sweet girl like Wynona had ever seen in him. Daddy said that the Millers’ business was their own, and Mama shouldn’t be talking about ‘em. Anyhow, Nate had paid his money and was about to shoot that old rifle. Nate steadied his rifle with his elbow on the low table and took careful aim before squeezing the trigger. The sound of the rifle echoed off the side of the building, and the bullet hit the target at the intersection of the two lines on the target. Mr. Thompson sent one of the younger boys to bring the target back for all to see.

“I believe we have a winner,” announced Mr. Thompson.

“Let me see that!” Mr. Mack demanded, and after looking at the target said, “Yeah, it’s good, but not quite as good as my shot!”

Daddy spoke up and said, “Let’s see your target, Mr. Mack.”

“I’ve thrown it away, but I know it was better. Y’all doubtin’ my word?” Mr. Mack’s face started to turn red.

“No, we just want to see who’s the winner,” said one of the men.

“I know my rifle is better, and I’m a better shot than that. Cecil, put up another target.”Mr. Mack said as he took the custom rifle from its beautiful carved leather case.

Mr. Mack worked the action of the big rifle to load a cartridge into the chamber. He aimed carefully and fired. The rifle jumped in the big man’s hands and made a loud noise and the bullet made a large hole in the center of the target.

“See that, boys! That’s how a winner shoots!” Mr. Mack seemed to be bragging.

There were murmurs in the crowd about how great it was.

Mr. Mack looked down at little Nate and said, “Your turn boy!”

“We ain’t got another dime, Mr. Mack.”

“Cecil, here’s a dollar, let the boy shoot.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Mack.”

Nate went through the same routine, and the little rifle cracked once more. Mr. Thompson's boy brought the target back for all to see, and there was only the big hole in the center.

“See, he didn’t even hit the target! There’s just one hole in the target and that’s mine!” the big man said with a big grin on his face.

“Maybe the boy’s bullet went inside your bullet hole. After all, a .22 is much smaller that your .30 caliber,” Daddy said.

“Yea, that’s right,” someone else said.

“All right, all right, we’ll do it again,” Mr. Mack said in frustration.

Once again a target was put up on the old pine tree, but this time Nate shot first and then Mr. Mack shot.

“Look here,” somebody said as they crowded around the target, “Mr. Mack done got beat!”

“He shore did!” somebody else echoed.

“It can’t be!” said the lawyer in a loud voice.

“Look at the target. The boy’s bullet hit right in the center but this big bullet hole is off to the side!” Mr. Thompson said.

“You all felt that wind didn’t you? That’s why my shot was off a little. The wind moved the target. Any fool could have seen that!” said the big man as his face was getting red.

“I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. We’ll shoot one more time, and if I don’t beat the boy, I’ll give him this rifle.” A hush fell over the crowd ,and they heard Mr. Mack add, “No white trash boy’s going to show me up!”

You would have thought we were in church by how quiet the crowd of fellows was behind Thompson’s store that day. Hardly anyone breathed as the shooters got ready.

Nate shot first again. The little rifle cracked, and a bullet hole appeared exactly where the two lines crossed on the target. Then the big rifle roared, and a large bullet hole appeared about one half inch from the first bullet hole in the target secured by four nails.

The big man said not a word but threw the big rifle at the feet of the boy in ragged clothes. Then, he pushed his way through the crowd to his car, and we expected to hear it roar away. But, to our surprise, he came back and picked up the rifle.

“I’ll buy it back from you, boy!” he said as he pulled a roll of money from his hunting pants pocket. I watched him peel off twenty one-hundred dollar bills from a roll and throw them at Nate. Nobody spoke as we heard the big Cadillac roar off down the road.

Well, we didn’t win the turkey, but I knew there was a big fat hen in the barnyard for Thanksgiving. I had been to my first turkey shoot and would attend many more through the years, but I would never forget the first one. The next year the county consolidated all the country schools into the city schools and I lost touch with the Miller boys.

Some forty odd years later I was in Barnes and Noble looking at some books and drinking a decaf mocha when I found myself in the military book section. I had been reading some of W.E.B. Griffin’s military novels and decided to try some non-fiction. I picked up a paperback off the shelf by the title: The Corps' Greatest Rifleman and underneath was a photograph of a Marine in camouflage uniform. His was of slight build and his face was in shadow but I recognized the face as Nate’s.

The Last Bastion of American Enterprise

“V nickels? Buy or sell?” he asked as he bumped into me. He was rather short with grey stubble covering his friendly face under the flop hat. The little man had on faded bib overalls and high top shoes, but his most noticeable feature was his eyes. They were cloudy white where mine and yours have color. Yes, he was either blind or very near being sightless. Clutched in his hand was a roll of nickels. I told him I wasn’t interested, and he went on his way.

This was my first venture into America’s last bastion of free enterprise, the flea market. It is the purest form of modern commerce. There are no regulations, no taxes, policies, just free enterprise at the grassroots level. I’ve long been a fan of flea markets, sometimes called jockey lots. The term flea market we get from the French. It seems that fleas were commonly found in used clothes and bedding. I’m not sure where the term jockey lot comes from. I’ve been a buyer and seller at flea markets. To me it is the land of colorful characters, not to mention an endless variety of merchandise.

Recently, I overheard this conversation.

“It puts out 50,000 volts and that packs quite a wallop”, he said.

“Will that stop somebody attacking me?” she asked.

“Ma’am, if that don’t stop ‘em, ain’t nothin’ gonna stop ‘em short of a bullet!” he said.

“How much is it? She asked.

I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation as someone started up a weed eater nearby, and I began looking at a 12 gauge shotgun for sale by a lady at the table next in the row. She said that it was made in the late 1800’s and could have been; the action was very loose. A few tables further down some fellows told me that the gun wasn’t what she claimed. I wasn’t interest at the price level at which she was selling it. As I walked along I deftly picked up a butterfly knife from a seller’s table and flipped the knife open with one quick, easy motion. The flash of sunlight off the seven inch blade caught the vendor’s eye.

“Every time I try that I cut myself,” he said.

“Yes, but they cause nothing but trouble!” I responded.

“But, you’re pretty fast!”

“Even the more reason I should leave it here,” I said as a lay the knife back down.

There’s an old song by Arlo Guthrie that says; “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant”. But, Arlo hadn’t been to the flea market. I am always amazed at the variety of products. The root doctors are quite interesting. They have the remedies for what ails you. Some of them remind me of my grandmother’s. Some believe in those back woods medicines or, more properly known as folk medicine. Who is to say the yellow root and willow root aren’t medicinal, and I must have sassafras for tea. I haven’t seen any root doctors in the Carolina low country like there is in Anderson and Pickens counties.

The Anderson Jockey Lot is the largest in the southeast with over 1,000 vendors. It was once fairly small but grew into an outdoor Wal-Mart with prices about the same on some items. I like to get out away from the sheltered areas to where people just put their goods out in front of their truck and sell. Sometimes it is pure junk, but sometimes… I bought a black tea set that polished out as silver plate. My wife loved it. I missed buying a pair of slave leg irons, I didn’t know exactly what they were when I saw them. At a flea market in France I saw a Thompson submachine gun, but I thought I would never get it through Customs if I bought it. Flea markets are great for people who collect things. Whether it’s comic books or Hot Wheels cars, you can usually find some at the flea market. I usually buy used tools. Good quality tools last practically forever, and new ones are expensive.

There are the vegetable vendors with local and other produce. This also includes chickens, ducks, quail, and pigs. I remember one vender in particular who sold his produce by the bag. You could hear him call out, “Vegetables, two dollars a bag. Just put something in the bag, lady! Just put something in the bag!” He sold a lot of vegetables. Frequently, the grower would be selling his own crop. Somehow you get that extra connection to the land when you buy it from the man that grew it. Seafood is commonly for sale locally at the Ladson Flea market. Fresh fish and shellfish abound, sold by Vietnamese fishermen. Puppies, kittens, birds and other pets are for sale as well. I’m not real crazy about the reptiles, but different strokes for different folks. There are fighting chickens for sale too but you have to be careful who you ask about them. A fighting cock which has won a number of derbies can demand an unbelievable high price. It is illegal to fight chickens in South Carolina but not to raise and train them.

I have a lot of fun bargaining for the things I buy. I My rule number one is never pay the asked price. I will either buy it cheaper or not buy. Many times I’ve walked away only to come back to the same vendor and buy at my price. Toward the close of the day the prices on everything go down. Of course, you take a chance on not finding what you want late in the day. There are some caveats; the merchandise may be stolen or counterfeit, and there are no guarantees.

Some flea markets, like the one in Pickens, SC, have a band that performs when the market is open. I’m not sure if there are more than two or three regular band members. But there always seems to be at least five players. In true string band fashion there are guitars, mandolins, banjos, Dobros, harmonicas, and washtub bass. They seem to be mostly octogenarians. Once I saw a very thin old woman dressed in faded clothes playing a banjo and singing. She had a kerchief around her head and wore a man’s faded flannel shirt. Upon her feet were tennis shoes and white socks. The banjo she played was an old homemade gourd one with a head that probably was once the skin of a tom cat. The knarled hands played the instrument claw hammer style and her voice had that high nasal twang. Her face showed the ravages of time, but her voice was clear as a bell as she sang the old songs of the mountains. She sang “Shady Grove” and “Wayfarin’ Stranger” and others before a wonderful version of Ralph Stanley’s “Gloryland”. The crowd was hushed as she sang “Gloryland” a cappella, the way it was recorded in the thirties. I had only heard it once before and that was at the Music Farm in Charleston. It was sung to a silent audience there as well. If you go to the Pickens County Flea Market you’ll hear some of the best bluegrass music right out of the hills, but I don’t know if the old woman of the mountain will be there.

I’m sure I’ll be at a flea market at the next opportunity but I don’t know which one, something about them just draws me back.

		Ralph Stanley, born February 25, 1927 is the grand old man of bluegrass and old-time music. he started playing the banjo clawhammer style as a teenager and with this brother formed the band "The Clinch Mountain Boys". He contunues to perform today. He re orded "O Death" for the soundtrack of the popular Coen Brothers movie, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Bacon

M-m-m! Bacon! Pork belly deluxe! Recently the Charleston Post and Courier did an article on making your own bacon. I sorta had a flashback to the days of my youth.


On a cold November day when you could make smoke with your breath I would be up at daylight or a little before. It was my job to get the cast iron wash pots filled with water and the fires built under them to get the water hot. All the water was drawn from a shallow rock lined well by hand. By the time I had this done the rest of the family was up and moving around the house. Neighbors were beginning to arrive. Butchering a hog is a labor intensive process. It was mostly men from the neighboring farms. A couple of women came along. During this hog killing time of year neighbors would go from farm to farm butchering hogs. But I only got to be part of one hog killing and that was the one at home.

Daddy picked up the old .22 rifle, grabbed a butcher knife and we headed to the hog pen. Along the way I harnessed a mule to a small sled. Uncle Jack and I joined Daddy. Daddy was a big man and a good shot with a rifle. He always had the job of killing the hog. The hog was a big one; about 300 pounds.

He said, “If you make like there’s line from the hogs left eat to his right eye and a line from his right ear to the left eye and shoot ‘em where the lines cross, the hog will drop every time.” It must have been true, because they always dropped. Daddy had a gun misfire once and almost got bit by a big hog. Hogs are the only domestic animal that will eat either meat or vegetables and they aren’t very particular about where either come from.

As soon as the hog was killed, Daddy would jump the fence and cut the hog’s throat so it would bleed. I watched the steam rise from the spilled blood and sucked on my skinned knuckle. Uncle Dewey saw me and said, “It’s just skin, Boy! It’ll grow back.” The grizzled, scrawny, seventy-five-year-old spit tobacco juice out between his missing teeth and grinned. He always called me, “Boy”. Daddy always called me , “Son” or “Dan”. I don’t know where he got the “Dan” from, he called my brother that too. Neither of us was named “Dan”.

As a twelve-years-old I gave it my all as we wrestled the 300 lb hog onto the sled and took it to the backyard to butcher it. But before you could start gutting the hog, hair or bristles had to be removed. And that’s where the boiling water came into play. We had a 55 gallon drum halfway buried in the ground at a 45 degree angle. I filled the drum up about half-full while Daddy and the other men used a hoist to get the hog off the sled. We would hang the hog from a tree branch over the drum of hot water so we could lower it into the drum. The hot water would loosen the hair of the hog, and we could pull it off. I got right in there with the men pulling off handfuls of hog hair. The temperature was about freezing so the hot hair felt good on my hands. It would take several dunkings into the water to complete the job. Finally a corn shuck would be set afire and used to burn off any hair that was left. The hog looked shiny white when we had finished. With the hog hung from the tree limb the head was cut off. I carried it in a dish pan with those eyes looking up at me to the kitchen table we had brought outside for butchering the meat. The head was trimmed, eyes and brains removed, etc. Brains would be eaten with scrambled eggs for breakfast. I would never eat them. Mom would have breakfast ready for those eating throughout the morning. Then the whole head would be put in a pot and cooked until all the meat fell off the bone. Mama would then grind it up to make what we called souse meat. It would congeal in a loaf pan and would be sliced and be eaten with mustard and onion in a sandwich. I wasn’t real crazy about it. She’d make liver pudding from the liver. I didn’t like that either. The hanging hog was split down the middle and the entrails removed. The men pulling out the entrails got a chance to get their hands warm. Care was taken not to puncture an intestine. We wouldn’t want to spill hog feces everywhere. The liver and kidneys would be saved and large intestine would be cleaned up for chitlins. Sometimes the bladder would be blown up for the younger kids to use for a ball. Yeah, every part of the hog was used for something except maybe the squeal. After cleaning out the inside of the hog the back bone was cut out with an ax. Each half of the hog was cut up on the table. Each man had brought his own butcher knife, so by noon the hams, shoulders, ribs, and other cuts were done. A lot of work, like cutting up the backbone and ribs, was done with a sharp ax. When the table was covered with bloody scraps it was my job to pour a bucket of hot water over it to keep the tabletop clean. Another job of mine was to keep the dogs away. After all the major butchering was done it was time for making sausage, lard and getting meat ready for the smoke house.

Most of the neighbors left at noon, so the rest of the work was done by family members. Hams and shoulders were trimmed of excess fat and rubbed down with a mixture of salt, sugar and seasonings. The process was simple; the mixture was rubbed into the meat until it wouldn’t accept any more. It was then hung up in the smokehouse with a hickory smudge fire burning. The pork bellies were processed this way also and this would be sliced thin as bacon. In those days hogs were grown fat, and that fat would be rendered out as lard. The fat was cut into two-inch cubes and put into a wash pot. The fat is cooked out and the hot grease is strained through cheesecloth in to lard cans. These left over small pieces of fried meat are called cracklings and used in cornbread for extra flavor. Rendering out the lard is a time consuming process and I had to keep the fire burning hot and stir the fat occasionally with an axe handle. Making sausage is also very labor intensive. Normally we made the sausage from left over scraps of meat. We ground the meat by hand, usually twice. Salt, pepper and sage were usually added. Sometimes we stuffed some for link sausage to be smoked. My uncle made spicy sausage. You could see the huge flakes of cayenne pepper in the sausage.

By the time we finished the hog killin’ the sun had gone down and we had enough meat to last almost a year. And it would be a year before we would be making bacon again. Making bacon was a bit different in those days. But the meat had no additives and the hogs were free range, raised on acorns, corn and table scraps with no added growth hormones. When we needed bacon we went to the smoke house and cut off some of the smoked pork belly, bacon. And I think it tasted better.

Make Your Own Bacon - The Post and Courier

Once Upon A Time In The District

It was a great trip to the District, Washington, D.C. We did not see the Smithsonian, Jefferson Memorial, White House, the Wall, or many more attractions. But, then, after all, that was not the purpose for our trip. We had a nice drive from Goose Creek, SC, to Fairfax, VA. Traffic wasn’t extremely heavy considering that we were on the east coast Armageddon of super highway travel, Interstate 95. We had spoken to the oldest son via cell phone and knew he was in route from New Jersey and the daughter from Georgia had called to say she was in a diner near the hotel. We checked in and were soon talking with the Arizona and California folks via telephone. Yes, the children were getting together with Mom. And I, well, I was Mom’s husband.


This trip was about family fun. When people are on both coasts it’s difficult to get them altogether. This trip had been in the planning stages for at least a year. We stayed at the same extended stay hotel except for the NJ contingent who stayed at Crystal City. We were only a mile from the Metro station, and that would be our major mode of transport around the area. I was surprised to find that all day parking was only $4.50. I think that was the only inexpensive thing we found there in the city.

It had been decided that we would go to Pizzeria Paradiso in Georgetown for dinner. We used our car to drive from Fairfax to Georgetown; the Acura was a bit roomier than the rental Chevy. We parked underneath a shopping mall and walked about a block back to the restaurant. We walked down two or three levels to the dining room where we were seated. The rest of our party met us there, and we had a table for ten. It was good to see everyone together for the first time in at least five years. I thought the food was a bit pricey, and service left a bit to be desired, but we enjoyed each other’s company. The sweet tooth crowd wanted to find a cupcake shop, and so our navigatrix found one close by using her cell phone. The line was out onto the sidewalk, and waiting is not my finest suit. Everyone enjoyed their favorite exotic cupcake before returning to the hotel for a good night’s sleep.

We were up early the next day but the not rest of our party. We had breakfast burritos in our room. At the Metro station we bought our “one-day” passes, which are good for any time of day except rush hour. Washington’s Metro is clean and modern and bigger than London’s tube but, unfortunately, several of the escalators were out of service.

We rode to Union Station and had lunch at a nearby Irish pub. Lunch was good, and Mark and Nathan joined us for our tour of the Capitol. One of the attractive interns from Senator Jim DeMint’s office led our tour of the capitol building. There were quite a few tourists on a weekday but not overly crowded. It is very inspiring and big. I found out that if the Statue of Liberty is placed inside the capitol rotunda, it would not reach the top!

We next visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. This is a great place for aerophiles like me. This was my second visit, so I was able to guide some of the newer visitors in our party around. I always learn something new at this museum. For example, the Airbus A380 is controlled by a joystick rather than the traditional yoke. Although this is a great museum, I find the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Chantilly better. The museum closes at 5:30, which seemed very early to me, but we did have time to get a soft serve ice cream which was a great treat for a hot day. Then, it was back to the sidewalk.

The group split up a bit as Nathan and Mark went to get Jen and meet us for dinner. According to one of the brochures we had, the American Art Museum was open until 7 p.m., so away we went. The George Ault show of 1940’s American paintings was very good. There is a good exhibit of folk art as well. I have mixed emotions about folk art. Much of the modern folk art is called outsider art. “Outsider” refers to the fact that the artists have no formal training.

Dinner was at a Mexican restaurant near all the Hispanic embassies. The food was great, and service was good, but it was extremely noisy. Dining was upstairs and open air. I thought the heat would be unbearable, but the overhead fans did their job. The place got a bad mark in my book for the life size cutouts of the President and First Lady by the entrance. Some members of our party even had their pictures taken with them. They are family. I still speak with them! By this time it was getting late and time to catch the Metro back to Fairfax. We got back to our room and watched some of the College World Series, and Carolina won. Although my blood runs orange I support those South Carolina teams in national competition.

The next day we did lunch in Crystal City: a hamburger restaurant in a mall. The brilliant designers had a clear glass roof over the dining area. It’s no fun to try to enjoy your food under intense heat. It was my least enjoyable meal.

We thought it would be a good day for a walk to the Lincoln Memorial. After a Metro ride, we exited at the station near George Washington University and began our walk. It took us by the Department of State, but I didn’t see Hillary Clinton anywhere. Kim, our navigatrix, kept us on track on this very warm walk. There was quite a crowd at the Memorial. Lincoln in his big chair is quite impressive up close. We had a good view of the Washington Monument without the benefit of a reflecting pool. The pool was empty for whatever reason.

After our visit to the memorial, which included a lot of walking, we were ready for the tearoom Kim had found, the Teasim Restaurant Penn Quarter. We had the afternoon tea menu: a selection of sandwiches, scones, tartlets, and other goodies with a pot of tea. There were a lot of Asian teas and menu items, but we stuck with Earl Grey and the traditional menu. We ate downstairs after getting our food. (No wait service here.) It was kind of cozy and quiet enough to carry on a good conversation. We spent about two hours in this place before saying good-bye to the New Jersey part of the family. They would not be joining us for dinner at Jaleo.

Jaleo, a Spanish restaurant, was a super treat. We had a reservation for 5:30 for an early dinner, because we had theater tickets for a 7:30 play. We had a good table for the seven of us by the window and the food and service were first class. The menu for the tapas style meal was in Spanish with English translations. My travelmate and I were excited about the Spanish food, since we will be visiting Spain in the fall. The arroz de pato, croquetas de pollo, dátiles con tocino ‘como hace todo el mundo’, butifarra casera con mongetes were all delicious, especially the dates wrapped in bacon and deep fried. We shared a carafe of sangria with Kim. It was the first sangria I had ever had with white wine.

The play was William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice at the Shakespeare Theater Company. The production was superb. This version was set in the early 20th century with period music. I found it quite interesting and the Shakespearaholic I’m married to was ecstatic. We watched the film version starring Al Pacino as Shylock before our visit to familiarize ourselves with the story. It was a late train we took back to Fairfax with the requisite homeless person sleeping on the train.

Morning came early and we decided we would have breakfast together before going our separate ways. There were only seven of us, since part of the family had left earlier in the day. It was a good breakfast at the diner, and we said our good-bys and planned to meet in Chicago in 2013.

Pizzaria Paradiso Teasim Restaurant Jaleo Other Picasa Photos from the trip.

I did not see Craig T. Nelson of The District anywhere.