Like ramblin' was a sin

 

 



Elizabeth Hill's apartment complex in NOVA land.

You people have not been on a roll in da Shagin Wagin in quite a while! For the past few winter months as I have been tied up with tree damage to the house, listing the house and other boring *sticks and bricks* issues. I had not seen my about to be 26 eldest son since Christmas, so I went a visiting to this apartment/condo complex. He recently moved closer to Washington DC to gain some of the advantages of big city life that were lacking in his last residence due to distance. His particular building is amongst thousands, hundreds of thousands, heck, maybe millions of town houses that populate the area known as Northern Virginia. As we took the 45 minute Metro ride to the hipper than thou DC neighborhoods of Georgetown and Adams Morgan, out of the window, it looked like tens of thousands of new townhouses were going up on every square inch.



See any other stealth campers in the parking lot? I think not.

I, of course took it as an opportunity for a little stealth camping. After we returned from IPA's at The

Tombs, a Georgetown University perennial favorite, an Ethiopian dinner, which was frankly not unlike dog food, and a dressing down by a waitress in a dive Salsa bar for bringing our beers from the bar to *HER* tables, I retired to read a little bit of James Michener's Hawaii. There was a nice rain and with the fragrant pine trees swishing in the wind as I drifted off to the sleep of kings. When I went to sleep, every parking space was taken; when I awoke at oh, say 10:30, I wasn't looking so stealthy, as everyone had disappeared around me.

 

Apartment 507, not as many plants as the Korean family upstairs.

 







 The next day we went and had some Pho, looked at the old house my son returned to when he was born almost 26 years ago, when I was working as a chef at The Mayflower Hotel in DC. We then generally looked at all the government buildings, that had thousands, hundreds of thousands, heck maybe millions of people working in them.....DOING WHAT EXACTLY?, we pondered. That night we went to a large Korean supermarket around the corner, which offered seven different kinds of fresh kim chee and noodles of every description. We settled on grilled skirt steak, grilled Korean squash and eggplant, soba noodles and one of the kim chees, washed down by Korean beer, made of course by Anheuser Busch. Since I had been so far successful in violating rules about camping in his parking lot, we took another chance on using real charcoal on the Webber, in violation of clearly stated HOA rules. No officers of compliance came a knocking in either case.

 

 After another peaceful night in the parking lot, pondering if I was perhaps the first human being to have that exact parking lot view while laying in a Shagin Wagin on a Zen Shiatzu Yoga massage mattress,

http://www.zenshiatsuchicago.org/store/futons/

I headed down US 17 to Hartfield,Virginia, where my brother and his girlfiend were viewing this ecosystem on the Piankatank river:

Wetland view of the Piankatank river, near Deltaville, Virginia

 

We went to the Rappahannock River Oyster tasting room for, well oysters, over looking these young entrepreneurs sea to table operation. Folks this is a story that really will make you want to take the plunge and start your own business: http://rvanews.com/features/three-business-lessons-i-learned-from-rappahannock-river-oysters/65891 

 

 

 

 

 Ah, gentle reader, da Shagin Wagin went out ramblin' for companionship, new experiences and driveways to visit from and we found it in spades.