Crossing State Lines for Dinner
Nov. 20th, 2021 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerWoodbridge, VA - Sat, 20 Nov 2021, 10pm.
Our flight to Virginia (just outside of Washington, DC) continued smoothly from this morning. Our connecting flight from Chicago was late arriving, but not too badly; only about 15 minutes. And picking up our rental car was much less painful than it could have been. Inside the rental depot the lines were full. Even the line for Avis Preferred members had at least 5 people in it, with only one agent serving the line. Fortunately I am not just Avis Preferred but also a member who knows how to use the app. I had selected my vehicle in advance, from my phone, and skipped the line entirely.
As if we hadn't already traveled far enough for the day, flying more than 2500 miles to get to Virginia, we crossed one more state line to meet friends for dinner in Silver Spring, Maryland. Our late arrival at the airport had set us back a bit, and traffic on the Beltway set us back more.
Dinner and catching up with old friends we haven't seen in... wow, at least 3 years. Damn you, Coronavirus... was fun. Hawk told them about my blog entry 30 Years of the Wheel of Time and how it made her realize how old she is. That started a discussion about how the years have crept up on us. ...Most of us, anyway. One of Hawk's friends married a husband 8 or 10 years younger. He enjoyed teasing us by responding to high school stories with, "And I was 4 then."
After dinner we crossed back across the state line to Virginia, traveling a little ways south to Woodbridge, near where my youngest sister and her family and our mom live. After checking in to the hotel we dashed back out to a Target store nearby to buy a few drinks and snacks for the room. We're here for 4 nights, after all, and if there's anything we don't eat here we can take it with us when we drive to my inlaws' for the following 4 nights.
One immediately obvious difference between Maryland and Virginia was masking. In Maryland, the restaurant required masks, and everyone wore them without fuss. In Virginia, neither our hotel nor the store require masks. Signs only state they're recommended. The mask wearing rate looks to be about 10%.
Our flight to Virginia (just outside of Washington, DC) continued smoothly from this morning. Our connecting flight from Chicago was late arriving, but not too badly; only about 15 minutes. And picking up our rental car was much less painful than it could have been. Inside the rental depot the lines were full. Even the line for Avis Preferred members had at least 5 people in it, with only one agent serving the line. Fortunately I am not just Avis Preferred but also a member who knows how to use the app. I had selected my vehicle in advance, from my phone, and skipped the line entirely.
As if we hadn't already traveled far enough for the day, flying more than 2500 miles to get to Virginia, we crossed one more state line to meet friends for dinner in Silver Spring, Maryland. Our late arrival at the airport had set us back a bit, and traffic on the Beltway set us back more.
Dinner and catching up with old friends we haven't seen in... wow, at least 3 years. Damn you, Coronavirus... was fun. Hawk told them about my blog entry 30 Years of the Wheel of Time and how it made her realize how old she is. That started a discussion about how the years have crept up on us. ...Most of us, anyway. One of Hawk's friends married a husband 8 or 10 years younger. He enjoyed teasing us by responding to high school stories with, "And I was 4 then."
After dinner we crossed back across the state line to Virginia, traveling a little ways south to Woodbridge, near where my youngest sister and her family and our mom live. After checking in to the hotel we dashed back out to a Target store nearby to buy a few drinks and snacks for the room. We're here for 4 nights, after all, and if there's anything we don't eat here we can take it with us when we drive to my inlaws' for the following 4 nights.
One immediately obvious difference between Maryland and Virginia was masking. In Maryland, the restaurant required masks, and everyone wore them without fuss. In Virginia, neither our hotel nor the store require masks. Signs only state they're recommended. The mask wearing rate looks to be about 10%.
