I got my Ollie back from San Diego last night - thankfully without further incident! As I've spent the past few days eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner (I am SO bad at making proper food when it's just me here!), and having missed lunch we went out for a most delicious steak dinner at the Warehouse. It was utterly scrummy!!!! Then we wandered over to the Weekend Office to hear the band. It was a 5 piece Blues band that were playing, and they were really rather excellent. Possibly the best band that we've seen in there actually. We were walking home and trying to work out a way of remembering what they were called in order to look up when they were playing again...so we saw the Alan (braidwood - john) Walker Band.
We were not up early this morning. We were up way past my bedtime last night!!! Stephen was on West Coast time so he was fine, but I was practically asleep in my pinot grigio towards the end of the evening! We are up at the butt-crack of dawn every day, so I figure that an occasional lie in til 9:00 is okay. (The upside of being up so early, is that there have been some beautiful sunrises as I've been driving into work this week.) It was a gorgeous day today. Blue sky, fairly mild temperatures...a day for going out and seeing things! I decided that going to Eastern Market was just the thing for a Saturday morning. They have an arts market on a Saturday, as well as a food market. It was quite good, but not as big as I had imagined it to be. There were some stalls selling rather stunning photos of DC. I have decided that Stephen and I need to go through our photos as we have some rather stunning photos of our own, but we take them, download them and never really look at them again!!!
Eastern Market is in the Capitol Hill area of DC, so we debated whether we should drive in or take the metro...we decided to drive. Parking was challenging! We quartered the streets and eventually found a space...but it was on the other side of the street. Its one of the laws here that you have to park facing the direction of traffic, so as it was a little side street Stephen decided to do a 3 point turn so we'd be facing the correct way. Do you remember the scene in Austin Powers where Austin is trying to turn a buggy round in a corridor and is inching forward 2 inches and back 2 inches....well I was beginning to think that we were doing a pretty good re-enactment of that movie moment!!! After executing a perfect 25-point turn we got parked - yay!
I have told Stephen to go an buy a GPS system! I'm pretty good at map-reading, but I do find it stressful, especially as they are partial to signing the exits about 2 yards before you actually turn off, so I'm often having to work out how we get back to where we should be as we sail past our exit...or we're left trying to cross 4 lanes of traffic in 100 yards to get to the exit!
I was nagging Stephen this morning. Obviously drivers in San Diego are a little more laid back than here, because he came home and was leaving YARDS between us and the car in front as we were driving along! If you do that here people are on the horn in seconds! To be a courteous DC driver you need to drive about 10 feet from the car in front, maybe 15 feet if you are travelling over 40mph....which does have its disadvantages sometimes!! I was driving home last night, and there was a police car with it's lights flashing pulled over about a block ahead. I didn't think much about it until I practically ran into the back of the car in front! We were doing about 25mph in regulation 10 feet apart formation, and as soon as he saw the police car he (rather unexpectedly!) slammed on the anchors and then did a highly illegal u-turn with tyres screeching. As I drive a tank there was a strong possibility that I would just have run over the top of him, but I managed to stop, as did the car behind me...but only just!! I wonder what heinous crime he had committed to want to avoid driving past a police car, and risk totalling his car in a multi-car pile up!!!!
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