Thursday, July 30, 2015

Three Beautiful Things 07/29/15: Suburban Gridlock, Seeing Ana Maria, Taproom Discovery

1. I jumped on the 4 a.m. shuttle from the Ramada Inn to the airport and everything went smoothly from the time I checked in my bag until I landed at Baltimore Washington International Airport. The Deke had to brave barely moving traffic on the BW Parkway, but she and Olivia and David arrived to pick me up and we then braved barely moving traffic on I-95 for our trip to the Diaz's. What a grind..a trip to the airport and back that should have taken a grand total of about forty to fifty minutes took two hours. Olivia and David were champs, though, and it helped the Deke and me decide, for sure, that if I come into Baltimore again at around 4:30 on a weekday, I'll take mass transit back to Greenbelt.

2. Arriving at the Diaz's meant that I got to see Ana Maria for the first time. I'm not very experienced with babies, and I was very tired after all the traveling, so I decided to wait until Thursday to hold her for the first time.  I don't want to rush into these things.  Molly's doing pretty well. She's tired. he's sore from her workout.  She's in great spirits and will have Hiram home to help her for the next ten days or so.

3. I found a taproom.  Once settled in at the Diaz's, the Deke asked me to go on a beer run and I drove down to E. Randolph and New Hampshire to a bottle shop called Quench.  I picked up a sixer of the intense Double Dog Double IPA from Flying Dog and, for the Deke, a sixer of Peg Leg Imperial Stout. I didn't know that Quench's bottle shop had a taproom adjoining it.  This is great news!  It's only about 10 minutes from the Diaz house and features about twenty beers on tap and a food menu. I took a minute to peruse the taplist and it looks solid. I see a few visits to this joint in my future to check it out more deeply. (Out here in the Maryland D. C. suburbs, I don't see many taprooms -- unlike parts of Eugene where if you stand on a corner and throw a rock in any direction, you are bound to hit a taphouse. Finding one near Molly and Hiram is a great discovery.)

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