My friend Kelli is moving to Abu Dhabi in early December with her husband and two small boys - he's on his first post with the Foreign Service, so they're getting ready to dive into a completely new chapter of their lives. On the one hand, Kelli's husband has wanted to go into the Foreign Service for as long as I've known him (about 8 years); on the other hand, I'll definitely miss Kelli. We shared an office in my first non-Georgetown job post-college, slaving away as interns, making roughly $0.42/hour for the "honor" of saying we worked for USAID. We, along with Katie A., bonded that year over happy hours, a shared lack of anything resembling a real salary, and really stinky brie, and we haven't look back over the ensuing 8 years. So it's bittersweet to see them leave, but above all, I want them to be happy. SO as a final "hurrah" for Kelli, we drove up to St. Michael's, MD for a girls' night. Kelli, Katie (aka "hipster Katie" or "nose-ring Katie") and Mela met one of Kelli's friends from Delaware at a winery on Friday afternoon. No sense wasting time with trivial matters like dropping our stuff off at the hotel. I was the designated driver, a skill I'm seriously considering turning into a second career, and the other four girls plowed through 10 wines while I enjoyed the complimentary cheese and olive tray. And the winery's mascot, a one-year old rescue dog whose antics reminded me of certain attention-seeking labs I know...
We meandered from the winery to dinner at a seafood/steak restaurant on the main dock (where, of course, the woman from the winery's brother worked - gotta love small towns), where I convinced everyone that ordering hush puppies in addition to nice seafood dishes was a good idea, and we proceeded to stuff our faces. The food was decent, though I did notice as we sat down that the average age in the dining room was somewhere close to 80. Nothing wrong with that.
We made our way back to our hotel - no expense spared there, we went with the local Best Western - where we were in bed by 12:00am. Back in the day, we all could stay up until 3-4 in the morning and make it to work the next morning, no problem. Guess we're getting old, but we were all done by midnight. The next morning I was, of course, the first up, going for a nice run through town. I stopped at the ambitiously named "coffee shop" at the hotel on my way back to pick up some coffees from the continental breakfast bar...next time I'm in a small town during a waterfowl festival, remind me to skip the free breakfasts. A depressing scene, for sure, but I managed to find a small market next door where I was able to get my coffee and pastry fix.
We had to be back in DC by early afternoon, so we just wandered through town, taking in the shops and stopping for brunch. It was a gorgeous day - about 65 and sunny - and DC seemed very, very far away. Driving back into Saturday afternoon traffic on Florida Ave was a small punch in the face, and the 30 minutes it took us to get from the entrance to Georgetown campus to Key Bridge was another reminder that we weren't in Kansas anymore (yes, I just said that)...but it was fantastic to get away for even 24 hours.
