Ma heid

Our last weekend in Alexandria was one of hangovers and shoes........

We moved out of Rudy and Carol's and into our new digs on Friday as they were heading off for the weekend. After 7 hours in the office we packed it up, locked it up and headed off with our bags and cases in search of yet another bed!

We then took a wander down to King Street with a camera to capture a few quintessential Old Town views. Of course, whilst we were at King St we simply HAD to have a Pops Ice Cream and take it down to the Marina. It was just like the old days....us stuffing our faces with some of the best ice cream ever, and the water glasses man playing away in the background. Ahh...I'm gonna make a sentimental journey....

The sentimental journey continued with a trip to my favourite Old Town shop. Namely the Nine West Outlet store. A weeny shop packed floor to ceiling with SHOES!!!! And not only that - they were buy one pair, get one pair half off. So I did!

Our evening was spent recreating our old Friday night out. O'Connells for drinks, sitting outside on the patio at a Thai restaurant for dinner knocking back cocktails, O'Connells for another drink, then Two Nineteen (the weekend office) for more drinks and listen to the band. We made a startling discovery after being ripped off for $13 a glass of PG. Their sparking wine is the cheapest glass on the menu! It was pleasant drinking and a much more reasonable $7. So I had two....

All this boozing meant that the next morning was a little slow..! We headed to Chadwicks for Eggs Benedict and OJ before heading off to Seven Corners. Stephen went for a wander round the guitar shop and I headed to the shoe warehouse. What heaven this place is. As far as the eye can see are boxes of shoes....enough to make me drool! It really was like letting a kid loose in a candy store! All these shoes, all designer, and all reduced..... I really, really had to restrain myself and only bought four pairs. I had to remind myself that there wasn't a 40ft container to bring them home and I'd have to fit the six pairs I'd bought into a case somehow!!

Talk about doing retail therapy! We also went to Tysons Mall as well as Best Buy and Target. We went to Target because we'd figured by this time we'd need another case! We weren't wrong!!

After a late dinner in the Warehouse (yummy steak and crab cakes), we bumped into Morag and Simon along with a couple of their friends and ended up in O'Connells until about 1am. We were both feeling very sorry for ourselves on Sunday morning that's for sure!!! We headed off to the nearby Starbucks for a life-saving coffee and muffin only to find that it was queued about 20 deep with fun-runners. ARGH! Didn't they understand that I NEEDED COFFEE NOW!!!!

Packing with a hangover isn't too much fun. All that bending over when your head is pounding is not clever! At first I thought the new jumbo bag was overkill, then I realised that actually we were actually going to need every available crumb of space. Ooops....

We met with Morag, Simon and the girls for lunch in Southsides. It was burgers and cokes all round!! We all really needed the fat and the sugar! Feeling a bit more alive, but sad to be departing we headed to Dulles for the flight.

I love Virgin! We got an upgrade to Upper on the flight back. What a difference it makes when you have a fully flat bed and a little duvet and some lovely lady wakes you with an orange juice and breakfast in bed. It really is the only way to travel...shame we can't afford to book it!!

Monday was a hard day for me. Stephen headed into work and I got to work on the laundry. I was fine when I was doing something, but as soon as I sat down I was asleep a couple of seconds later!! I opened one case to find that that it had a note saying it was opened and searched. Now - fair enough - they're keeping us safe and I have no issues with that...but why they hell can't they repack it as opposed to scrumpling everything up into a ball and stuffing it back into the case? Worse than that, they had opened up my two carefully wrapped (suspect) packages and not wrapped them again. One was a carved in the round wooded Colonial Pineapple and the other was two plastic bottles of grape jelly. I'd carefully wrapped these in individual plastic bags, then put both bags inside another plastic bag in case they got crushed and went splat all over the case contents. Only one bottle was still in the double bag configuration. The other was loose in the case. I'd have been livid if that had burst all over my clothes!! Thankfully for my blood pressure an dry cleaning bill, all items made it intact.