Paddle Log #32 and 35 - Keep Loudoun Beautiful Potomac River Cleanup

It occurs to me that I never posted about last year's Keep Loudoun Beautiful cleanup event on the Potomac River, and here it is time for me to write about this year's cleanup.  So this post is a dual paddle log entry for both excursions.

Last year (2013) all geared-up and ready to go

Each summer, Keep Loudoun Beautiful hosts a couple of cleanup events on the local waterways.  The great guys at River and Trail Outfitters provide the canoes, paddles, and PFDs, and KLB provides trash bags, recycle bags, and long-arm grabbing tools.

2014 Washington Post photo by Lisa Bolton

They always have more people interested than they have boats, so you have to sign up in advance.  They won't even tell you where they're going to get in the water or get out of the water until you are a registered participant.  They don't want a lot of extra people showing up to participate and not have boats for them to use.

Safety brief before boarding the bus.

Our guide telling us some history of the river and reminding 

us of some safety rules before heading out. (2013)

Although KLB provided pizza at the take-out both years now, it's important to bring some snacks (or lunch) along.  Both times, we've met up at the take-out location at 8:30 a.m., turned in our liability waiver forms, had a safety brief from the River and Trail Outfitter guides, and boarded River and Trail Outfitter buses that take us up stream to the put-in location.  By the time we get up there and get in the water, it's about 10:30 a.m., and both times it has taken about 4 hours to get down to the take-out.  After arriving about 2:30 p.m., there's another 30 minutes or so of work unloading the trash from the canoes into the dumpsters, so it's 3 p.m. by the time you're getting in the car to go home. 

It's a beautiful stretch of the Potomac River here in Loudoun County.  Both times, we had beautiful days on the water and saw bald eagles, great blue herons, fish, and dragonflies.

My youngest son passing a can back for the recycle bag.

Last year, we were picking up every piece of trash we found as soon as we got on the water.  An hour later, we were only 1 mile into our 7 mile journey, and I said, "Alright boys, we're done picking up trash for today.  If we keep this pace, we won't make it home for dinner."  We just paddled onward to the takeout point.

This year, the guide said in previous years they get a lot of the trash at the upper stretch of the river, then everyone gets tired and just starts paddling for home.  So this year, he asked us not to pick up trash in the first mile so that we could focus some of our attention on the later miles of the trip.  We did.  It worked out well, but again, there came a point where we said "enough" because our canoes were pretty full and because we needed to paddle onward to the take-out point.

2014 Washington Post photo by Lisa Bolton

It amazes me how many tires we find in the river.  This year, we set a new KLB record for the number of tires pulled out of the river on a cleanup event - 90 tires!  The bin in the picture above was empty when we started.

We pulled 45 bags of recyclable material out of the river this year, plus filled up a 8 cubic yard dumpster with trash.

My silly boys describing this foreign concept 

of "land" after being on the water for so long.

Overall, the KLB cleanup events are a great way to get out on the water for the day, experience the beauty of the Potomac River, and provide a service to our community cleaning up the trash and preserving the beauty of the river.  Both years now, I have enjoyed the day with my boys on the river, and I hope we'll be able to do it again next summer, too.

If you're interested, please visit the Keep Loudoun Beautiful website.  Of note, they recently lost their funding from Loudoun County due to budget-crunch and belt-tightening, so they're relying on donations to keep them in operation.

GPS Stats:
Paddle Log #32:  7.1 miles, 3 hours 59 min, average speed 1.8 mph
Paddle Log #35:  6.9 miles, 3 hours 48 min, average speed 1.8 mph

Pentagon Gouge: Tomorrow is Car Free Day!

I'm going to see if I can make Pentagon Gouge my regular Monday post.

Reminder: TOMORROW (Tuesday, 9/22/2009) is Car Free Day in the DC Metro Area! If you register at the Car Free Website to either reduce or eliminate the use of your car tomorrow, you could win some free stuff.

Note, even if you already use public transit to commute, you can still pledge to go Car Free tomorrow.

As for me, I would normally drive to the park-n-ride in the morning (~5 miles away) and drive home again in the afternoon. Tomorrow, I plan to walk to the free Ashburn Farms Shuttle Bus and ride it to the park-n-ride and ride it home again in the afternoon.

Give it a shot!

NoVA Favorites

Updated 11/29/2013:  Updated a few odds and ends.
Updated 8/11/2012:  Lined-out a couple of restaurants that have closed.
Updated 12/24/2010: Added Baltimore day trip, USMC museum, and deleted a couple of restaurants that closed.
Updated 01/27/2010: Added bike rides
Updated 12/14/2009: Added Wegman's in Leesburg & Glory Days Grill in Broadlands.
Updated 09/02/2009: Added Kayaking and Tubing.
Updated 12/15/2008: Added Brunswick Railroad Museum.

For the year we were in Hawaii, I kept going back and updating one blog post as an easy reference point of our favorites on Oahu.

Now that we're back in the Northern Virginia (NoVA) suburbs of DC (a.k.a. Loudoun County (LoCo), I figure I should start a new update the old favorites list. I will periodically come back and update this blog post as we discover new fun things and good restaurants in the area.

If there's a website for the place or event, then the link in the title will take you to that website. If I've written a blog post about that specific place or event, then there will be a "blog post" link after the name.

Restaurants: I won't list national chains that you're all familiar with. These are locally unique places that you'll want to check out for something different.

Ashburn:

- Bonefish (blog post) in the Broadlands Shopping Plaza almost always has excellent service and very good food.  Kid friendly - our 7 year old son always asks, "Can we go to Bonefish?" Bonus we are within walking distance and can all enjoy a cocktail or wine with dinner. I just wish we could afford to eat there more than on special occasions.
Aside: Okay so I lied. Bonefish is actually a chain. My wife tells me they go as far south as Florida. I don't think they're as common as a Cheesecake Factory or P.F. Chang's or Olive Garden though, and it's still our favorite restaurant around Ashburn.

- Clyde's Willow Creek Farm in the Broadlands. The Clyde's restaurant group also own's my favorite restaurant in downtown DC, The Old Ebbitt Grill. My wife and I went to Clyde's for our 10th anniversary dinner. They really did a fabulous job of renovating this old farm into a beautiful restaurant. The service was friendly and attentive. It seemed they did a sort of zone defense because we had several different servers stop by our table to deliver things or ask if we needed anything. The food was absolutely to die for. I had the pumpkin ravioli with cranberries and walnuts in a cream sauce. My wife had the lobster special - a 1 1/4 pound lobster for $18.95, flown in fresh daily from Maine. The waiter recommended the chocolate bread pudding as the house specialty for dessert, so we had to try it. It was similar to the molten chocolate lava cakes you find at other restaurants, but it had a delicious port wine reduction sauce on it and there was no molten lava part in the center. Bonus that it's walking distance from our house, so we could both enjoy wine with dinner.


- American Flatbread (blog post) in the Broadlands off Ridgeway Drive. A localvore eatery (a place using fresh produce purchased from local farms). AWESOME, delicious pizza flatbread. (CLOSED :-( )

- Mediterranean Breeze across the street from the Ashburn Volunteer Fire Department, just north of where the W&OD bike trail crosses Ashburn Road. I go there for the Greek salads, gyros, and such. The kids always get pizza. Our boys frequently ask to go here, but I'm pretty sure it's because they like watching the fire trucks across the street. Good food, reasonably priced and good service.

- Mezza Grill in the Broadlands Shopping Plaza. Really delicious Mediterranean cuisine in a warm, friendly, clean family restaurant. I had a sampler (Mediterranean Delight) of just about everything they make. It all tasted very fresh and delicious, and I didn't get an MSG headache the next day. That's a huge success in my book. (CLOSED :-( )

- Nagoya Japanese Steakhouse in the Giant Shopping Plaza, corner of Claiborne and Ashburn Farms Parkway. This is one of those places where you have 8 or so chairs seated around the big grill. The chef comes out and does lots of fancy slicing, dicing, tossing, and setting things on fire for your entertainment. The food is delicious, the chefs are entertaining, and it's not quite as expensive as other Japanese steakhouses like Benihana.

- Glory Days in the same shopping center as American Flatbread (right next door as a matter of fact). This is a small regional chain with restaurants in Virginia and Maryland. The food is excellent. The service inside the restaurant is usually excellent. Tuesday nights they give a military discount, so we normally like to go there on Tuesdays. They have several TVs up on the walls, and at each table is a little speaker which you can select to whichever TV you want. One of the TVs is always on the Cartoon Network, so our boys like going and turning the speaker to that channel. They have a couple of cool drinks for kids, too. Our boys love the "Shark Bite." It's Sprite served with a plastic toy shark sticking up out of the drink. The shark is full of red food coloring or syrup, so you turn the shark over and dump it into the Sprite and it's sort of like blood, but it essentially makes a shirley temple. They advertise having curb-side to-go service, but we've tried it twice and have NOT been impressed (poor, in-attentive curbside service, got the orders wrong).  (CLOSED :-( )

Dulles / Sterling area (near Dulles Town Center mall):

- Sweetwater Tavern. This. Place. Is. Awesome. My favorite restaurant in the Dulles / Sterling area, and one of my overall favorites in NoVA. I rank it right up there with Bonefish. Sweetwater is the epitomy of my "breweries serve awesome food" theory, except it's a much nicer restaurant than your average brewery. The food is to die for and the beer is heavenly. Be sure to check out their custom made chandeliers and the awesome ginormous mural on the wall. Go in the autumn and try their Pumpkin Ale with the pumpkin pie crust seasoning around the rim of the glass. You can even buy a tankard of beer to take home with you, and they'll even give you a little pouch of the pumpkin pie seasoning to rim your glass at home. You can bring it back another time to be refilled for $8. The service is always top notch. Again, I wish we could afford to go here more often. Aside: The owners of Sweetwater also run a couple of other restaurants in the area. We have also tried and really liked their Coastal Flats restaurant down in the Fair Oaks area.

- Wegman's! (Near the Junction of Rt. 28 and Waxpool Road) Okay, so it's technically a grocery store, but they have an awesome sort of food-court on the right hand side where you can get fresh sandwiches, sushi, soups, pizza, chinese food, and all sorts of other stuff. If nobody in your family can agree what they want for lunch, then this is a great place to satisfy many different tastes. We go here frequently on Saturdays for lunch. Update 12-14-2009: A new Wegman's opened in Leesburg, and they are some distinct differences between the two.

Leesburg and western Loudoun County (LoCo):

- Blue Ridge Grill.  There are actually two locations of BRG - one in Leesburg and one in Brambleton.  Both are extraordinarily good and in close competition with Sweetwater for the title of my favorite restaurant in Loudoun County.  We have been to BRG many times and have never had a bad experience.  The service is always impeccable and the food is always to-die-for delicious, and the prices are very reasonable for the quality and quantity of food and the quality of service you receive.  Speaking from experience, do NOT try to go here on Mother's Day or Father's Day without reservations.  For that matter, don't try going ANYPLACE NICE in Loudoun County on Mother's Day or Father's Day without reservations. 

- Tuscarora Mill a.k.a. "Tuskies." A very nice restaurant. Lunch prices aren't bad ($10-15 entrees), but dinner is pricey ($20-$30 entrees). However, you definitely get what you pay for - excellent food and service. There's also an attached cafe with a smaller menu and lower prices.

- Magnolias at the Mill Purcellville. Is actually owned by the same people who own Tuskies. Magnolias is another very nice restaurant with fantastic food and excellent service, but this one is set in an old mill. It's also pretty pricey, so we couldn't afford to go there on a regular basis. My recommendation: Plan your fall or spring Loudoun County Farm Tour trip around ending up in Purcellville for either lunch or dinner at Magnolias.

- Wegman's! There is a new Wegman's just off Rt. 7 on the east side of Leesburg. As I mentioned above, there are some distinct differences between the Dulles / Sterling Wegman's and the Leesburg Wegman's. Dulles does kids meals with a slice of pizza or chicken strips, they do NOT offer that option at Leesburg. They DO however offer subway-type sandwich kids meals at Leesburg, which they won't do at Dulles. Leesburg has a burrito station in the food court. Another thumbs-up for the Leesburg location is they have COKE, whereas the Dulles location has Pepsi. Bizarre, eh?

Local Chains with several locations:

- Five Guys! If you've ever been to Southern California, Five Guys is very similar to In-n-Out burger. Very simple menu. Hamburgers. Fries. Soda. Fries made fresh. They post on a dry-erase board where the potatos came from that they used to make your fries.

Aside: There was a really interesting article in the Washington Post (3 April 2006 in the Financial Section) about the family that started five guys and their reluctance to franchise. They're VERY particular about EVERYTHING being done RIGHT in EVERY store, from the type of pickles (Mt. Olive), to the number of shakes of seasoning they are to put on the french fries (15 shakes), to the order in which they place the burger, the tomatos, the pickles, etc. Oh, and you can't just opt to build ONE Five Guys. If you apply for a franchise, you have to build FIVE of them.

Events:

- Dulles Plane Pull in October. This is a fund-raiser for the Special Olympics held on the tarmac at Dulles airport. You can enter a team to participate in the contest and pull a commercial jet from a start line to a finish line marked on the pavement. Or you can have fun just watching. Besides the plane pull contest, they have many static aircraft displays set up for kids to climb around real airplanes and helicopters. There's also a kids' school-bus pull contest.

- Loudoun County Farm Tour (blog post). One in the fall and one in the spring. Check out the website and mark your calendar!

- Blue Ridge Center for Environmental Stewardship offers educational walks (blog post). One is a bird walk on the 4th Saturday of each month. Once in the fall and again in the spring, Phil Daley leads a family nature walk. We took our boys on the fall walk. We really enjoyed it and learned a lot about local trees, plants, and animals. Phil was great with the kids - showing them things, asking them questions, and keeping them engaged.

- Sunset Parade at the Iwo Jima Memorial. The USMC Silent Drill Team does an awesome performance at the Iwo Jima Memorial during the summer time. It's open to the public. See this blog post for more information and links to the website.

Sunset Parade at Iwo Jima Memorial

Places:

- Naval History Museum on the Washington Navy Yard. This is a hidden gem. The website isn't very exciting, but provides you the basic information about the museum. Although it is on a military base, it is open to the public. If you have a DoD decal and ID card, then you can go whenever you want. If you aren't military, then you need to contact them and make a reservation in order for them to meet you at the gate and escort you in.

Final Bearing and Shoot!

There's a LOT to see at this museum. It's generally laid out in a timeline with the oldest stuff closest to the front doors and gradually going through eras of naval history. There's a room off the side near the entrance devoted to submarines with two periscopes that stick out the roof of the museum. There's also an old destroyer, USS BARRY there open for tours along with a lot of other cool static displays on the waterfront like 16-inch armor plating with bullet holes in it from testing the armor.

- National Museum of the Marine Corps down in Quantico is EXCELLENT and FREE.

- Udvar Hazy Center just south of Dulles Airport. Admission is free. However (comma) it costs $12 to park, so pack as many people into one car as you can. There is also a free shuttle that runs from the National Air and Space Museum in downtown DC out to the Udvar Hazy Center. Here you can see the Enola Gay, the Space Shuttle Enterprise, a concord, and a lot of other cool stuff.

Make sure you DON'T go on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima (6 August), or you might get red paint thrown on you by the protesters trying to attack the Enola Gay.

Also make sure you go into the space wing of the museum and look for the model of the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The nerds who built it hid a bunch of objects on it like a tie fighter, R2D2, a traffic light, a cemetery, a school bus, and a submarine. There's a list of the hidden objects posted on the side of the display. See if you can find them all!

- Luray Caverns and Carriage Museum. Just a couple hours' drive outside of DC over in the Shenandoah Valley, these caverns are spectacular, and the carriage museum has a lot of really nice antique cars.

- Frying Pan Farm in Herndon, VA, runs using technology from the 1920-1950 timeframe. They keep their website updated with news of the birth of baby animals for you to stop and see. There are lots of historic displays of antique farm equipment. There's a nice playground for the kids, and a pretty cool gift shop, too.

YB and ES pet a goat at the Frying Pan Farm.

Mooooo.

YB climbs on the playground at Frying Pan Farm.

There is also a really cool geocache at the Frying Pan Farm. You need to print out the clue sheet from the geocache listing and seek the answers to the questions on the historic signs and displays around the park. Once you locate the answers, it will give you the coordinates for a traditional ammo-can geocache.

- Brunswick Railroad Museum in Brunswick, MD. (Blog post) Bigger and more to see than the NoVA model railroad place in Vienna (see below), and open every weekend. You have to pay admission though - $6 per adult and $3 per kid. I thought it was worth it though.

- Northern Virginia Model Railroad in Vienna. They are open one Saturday per month for an open house. It's a fairly small place compared to other model railroad museums we have visited, but it's still fun for the kids. They have a trolley car train that the kids can operate and get a qual card signed off showing they're a certified engineer. It's right on the W&OD trail, and there's also an old caboose you can walk through.

ES and YB by the caboose in Vienna, VA.

- Western Maryland Scenic Railroad. We went on this ride as part of a group rate arranged by my office. It was a really pretty ride through the countryside. It takes you from Cumberland, MD up the hill to Frostberg. Everyone gets off and you can get some lunch in town while they turn the locomotive around on a turntable (that's neat to watch, too). Then the train brings you back down again.

Blunoz Family Portrait in front of Western Maryland Railroad Station

The Boys on the Locomotive

View from the train

- Baltimore is just a short hour or so drive up the road from DC, and there is a TON of cool stuff to see and do with kids around Baltimore.  We took an awesome family weekend getaway there (click on the Baltimore link to read about it).

- Kayaking. There are lots of beautiful spots around the Potomac River, Goose Creek, Antietam Creek, Beaver Creek Dam Reservoir to go kayaking or canoeing around NoVA, and there are a few outfitters around that will rent kayaks/canoes and/or provide livery service if you have your own (for example: River Riders, Jack's Boathouse, more are around on Google).

- Tubing on the Shenandoah River. We went with a large group from our church, but you can go anytime you want. River Riders runs buses to the put-in and pull-out points along the Shenandoah River every 30 minutes.

- Downpour at Algonkian Regional Park. Fun water park in the summertime. There's a little kids section and a big kids section with a water slide. We bought the season pass. I think you have to go like 3 times in order to get your money's worth from the season pass.

Great Wolf Lodge! Not exactly a local excursion, but I recommend a trip down to Williamsburg to go to the Great Wolf Lodge and their indoor water park. It really is worth getting a room there for one night, because paying for one night there gets you admission to the water park on both the day of your arrival and the day of your departure. Go down, play in the water park, stay the night, play in the water park again, drive home.

Bike Rides:

- Although the W&OD trail goes right through Ashburn, you need to be careful of all the Lance Armstrong wanna-be's who ride on their high speed bikes and don't so much as give you a heads-up they're going to scare the bejezus out of you when the FLY past you at Mach 3. However, there are some other really awesome rides in the area.

- C&O Canal Tow Path is nice because (a) it's close by, (b) the hard pack dirt/gravel keeps the Lance Armstrong wanna-be's away, and (c) the scenery is beautiful along the way. There are several points you can get on or off the C&O Canal Tow Path. I went on a very nice ride from Point of Rocks, MD down to the White's Ferry crossing.

- Great Allegheny Trail. This is another railroad converted to bike path. It starts waaaaay up in Pennsylvania and comes down through Frostburg and Cumberland, MD, and it ends where the C&O Canal Tow Path starts. I went on an awesome bike ride up over the eastern continental divide and down into Cumberland, MD. They joke that you don't need pedals from the eastern continental divide down to Cumberland - just brakes.

- Want a great bike ride with your kids? You can buy a one-way ticket on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad and take your bike on the train with you, then get on your bikes and just ride back down the hill into Cumberland. I saw a lot of families with small children doing this when I went on the Greater Allegheny Trail ride, and I made a mental note to myself that I'd like to take my wife and kids to do that.

Like I said, I will come back here periodically and update it with new stuff.

Travel Log: Second LONG Day of Driving

Today we headed over to the California coast to see the Redwoods. It took us a bit longer to get there than anticipated due to a lot of this:


The trip started out well enough, with ES declaring his little feifdom in the back seat his own "paradise." He had everything he needed - DVDs, Nintendo, coloring books, snacks...

About 45 minutes later, I had to pull the car over on the side of the road when the SECOND fist-fight started in the back seat because YB didn't want to play the same thing that ES did on the Nintendo.

It's gonna be a long trip folks.

We stopped in Eureka, CA, and had lunch at the Lost Coast Brewery. Why is it breweries always have awesome food? I mean, their specialty is supposedly beer, right? So why would they kick other non-beer-oriented-restaurants' collective butts when it comes to making darn good food? Anyway, I digress.

Lost Coast Brewery

I had a yellow chicken curry that was absolutely to die for. I mean it was SO good... (How good was it?)

It was THAT good.

Seriously, I would've licked the plate clean, but my wife would've whacked me across the back of the head and ES would have hung his head in shame and embarassment. The waitress told us they make everything there in house with the exception of the Italian dressing, and she swore up and down and verified with the chef that there was no MSG in the curry. As much as I love curry, I normally can't have it because of the MSG. This curry also had sweet potatos in it which was just the epitome of "fusion." Sweet potatos and curry powder together? Who knew?

I tried a nibble of the boys "chicken nuggets", fries, and barbecue sauce and they were all awesome. My wife and I tried a sample of the Tangerine Wheat Ale and the Downtown Brown Ale, and they were both excellent. (Aside: In spite of my claim that all breweries have awesome food, the opposite does not always hold true. I've been to a few breweries where I just didn't care for the beer at all.)

We headed south to the Humbolt Redwoods State Park and drove through the Avenue of the Giants.

Shot out the window at the entrance to the Avenue of the Giants while LW grabbed a pamphlet from the welcome kiosk.

I had to lay down on my back to take this picture of YB next to one of the ginormous redwoods.

Then I put the camera on the ground and used the timer-feature in the camera to take this self portrait.

Then we went to see the Drive-Thru Tree. My wife hopped out of the car with the camera and ran ahead of us to take a picture as we drove through.

The Drive-Thru Tree

We barely squeezed through. The side view mirrors brushed the edges of the tree a little bit, but we made it.

Rewind to entering the Avenue of the Giants. I told the boys to put away their Nintendo's while we drove through the redwoods, and they could play with them again when we got back on the highway. YB happily complied and enjoyed getting out of the car with me to take pictures. ES was a total pain in the arse - whining and complaining about how he "didn't care about a bunch of stupid trees."

However, I'm happy to report that the Drive-Thru Tree made it all worth it. Both boys were laughing and giggling and reaching out the windows and touching the tree. ES declared that doing the drive through tree was worth the stop. Hooray!

We continued on down US-101 across the Golden Gate Bridge. That was the second highlight for ES today. He was really excited about going over the Golden Gate Bridge.

During the many hours on the road today, ES proclaimed we were in "mun." That's what it sounded like anyway, but then he explained it's actually M.O.N. Middle of Nowhere. During the intervening hours before we got to Eureka and in between the redwoods and the Golden Gate Bridge, ES came up with other variations or degrees of MON-ness depending on the frequency of the houses and number of cars on the road, such as K.M.O.N. for "Kinda Middle of Nowhere." Being the geek that I am, I contributed to his list and added N.C.M.O.N. for "No Cellular Middle of Nowhere."

Tonight, we stopped in San Francisco to have dinner with my wife's cousin, Cara. She lives at the top of a hill with a nice view of the city. What were the boys most interested in at Cara's house?

The mail slot.

They were enthralled by the fact that they could push their shoes through the mail slot in the front door. Sometimes I wonder - Are they really related to me???

Tomorrow, I hope to bore ES with more big trees and to satisfy one if not two of our favorite food cravings during our third long day of driving across country.

Today's Statistics:
- 342 Number of sharp-hairpin turns we made while following the Trinity River along Hwy 299. (Okay, I made that one up, but it was a LOT).
- 30 Average speed driving through all those switchbacks
- 20 Number of miles per gallon we got on the switchbacks and going up and down hills today. Yesterday we got 25 mpg, but it was mostly long straight roads and I was able to set the cruise control and draft behind large trucks.
- 16 Number of logging trucks we passed chock-full of enormous freshly cut trees.
- 16 Same number of hippie's hitchhiking on the side of the road.
- 1 Number of filthy-nasty-disgusting gas station bathrooms we had the pleasure of visiting. On a postive note, two thumbs up to California DOT for running the cleanest rest-stop bathrooms I've ever seen! You could practically eat off the floor!
- 342 Number of bugs splattered across our windshield. (Okay, I didn't actually count them all, but it seemed like a good ballpark estimate.)

Weekend Recap

An Unusual Experience at the Barber Shop

On Saturday, we had lunch at the NEX, then LW went to the Commissary while I took the boys to get haircuts. In case you haven't been there before, the NEX barber shop in Pearl Harbor is HUGE. There are probably twelve barber chairs in there, usually with about 9 or so barbers working during the day. The waiting room has enough seats for about 20 people to wait, and they're normally full in the middle of the day.

The parking lot was PACKED, so we were expecting the worst (both in the commissary and the barber shop). I opened the door to the barber shop and did a double-take. Not only was the waiting area half empty, but the people that were sitting in the seats were all wearing barber coats! They didn't have any customers! The waiting area had transformed from an area for customers to wait for barbers into an area for barbers to wait for customers. Very bizarre.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Worst Restaurant Experience on Oahu (so far)

After church on Sunday, we decided to forego our favorite Zia's and try one of a handful of places in Kailua that an acquaintance had recommended. First we tried going to Moke's, but there was a line of people waiting out on the curb. We were starving, so we skipped Moke's.

Instead, we tried going to the Mexican place next door to Boots & Kimo's. I think it was called Cisco's Cantina. We walked in, and it smelled pretty darn good in there. There were about twelve tables in the place, and only three of them were occupied.

Hindsight: I guess maybe that should have set off alarm bells in my head since Boots & Kimo's next door had the usual line of people waiting outside - why weren't people lining up to take the empty spots in THIS restaurant???

There were no employees anywhere in sight. We noticed that there were menus out on each of the tables, so after a minute or so of standing there we just decided to grab a table. Eventually a waiter came out of the kitchen and delivered something to one of the other tables. He made eye-contact with me and said, "I'll be right with you." Okay, cool.

Over the course of the next 20 minutes, it became apparent to me that he was the ONLY employee working in the front half of this restaurant. Heck, for all I know, he was the ONLY employee working there PERIOD. He could have been doing the cooking in the back for all I know. In that time, he visited our table once to take our drink orders and LW asked him if they had a kids menu. He said yes and that he'd "be right back."

Yyyyyeah, not so much.

After several minutes of watching him visit each of the other tables, he did bring back our soft drinks with some chips and salsa, but that was the last we saw of him for about another ten minutes. Maybe he was cooking in the back, who knows. We were starving, and LW had a hair appointment for 3 p.m. that she was NEVER going to make at the rate he was going.

We had consumed ALL of our soft drinks and very nearly ALL of the chips and salsa and he still had not come back with the kids menu much less taken our food orders. LW and I decided we had waited long enough and it was time to abort. We left a few dollars of cash on the table to cover the soft drinks, packed up the kids' coloring books and stuff and left.

We went back to Zia's. Their special today was a papaya seafood salad with shrimp and fresh ahi, and it was delicious. The speed of their service wasn't super fast, but I have no doubt we got out of there a heckuva lot quicker than we would have over at the Mexican place. As it was, we barely made it home in time for LW to hop in the car and leave for her hair appointment.

Anyway, the whole point of this was that I couldn't remember the last time (if ever) I went to a restaurant and actually got up and left like that because nobody was serving us.

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Family Movie Nights

One day on vacation, the boys caught a few minutes of Around the World in 80 Days on TV and wanted to watch the rest of it. I picked it up at Blockbuster and we watched it for Family Movie Night on Friday. Little did I realize, this would be the boys' first Jackie Chan flick.



My first Jackie Chan flick was Rumble in the Bronx with Jud in NY. I had never heard of Jackie Chan before Jud took me to see that movie, and WOW what a lot of choreographed action!
Around the World in 80 Days was a pretty good movie. ES and I enjoyed it at least. YB wasn't able to follow the storyline so well and he ended up playing Webkinz on my computer while we watched the movie.

Saturday night we had another Family Movie Night and watched Back to the Future. ES really liked it a lot. I wasn't sure YB would understand it or like it, but he did sit through the whole movie.





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Hooray for Recycling!

We just got a notice that they are going to begin curb-side recycling pick-up in our housing area on April 22nd. Finally!!! Almost in time for Earth Day, eh? I'm so glad I won't have to feel guilty about tossing recyclables in the trash anymore.


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Blast from the Past

I meant to include this in my post about scuba diving on Thursday. My guys got a good laugh out of seeing the photo on my scuba certification card.


Just now, as I was adding the photo to my blog, YB saw it and asked "Who's that?" I told him it was Daddy. He smiled. I asked him, "Doesn't it look like Daddy?" He smiled and vigorously shook his head NO. NO?!?! Common, I don't think I look THAT different, do I??? Okay, so that was almost 19 years ago...

Monday Night Food and Fitness

FOOD

Layered Mexican Chicken casserole. LW did her usual excellent job of making dinner for us this week. My favorite meal of the week was this new one she tried from a WW recipe. LW said she used low-fat sour cream instead of fat-free, but she used less of it than the recipe called for. This meal put me in the flashback machine. One of my favorite meals that my mom made when I was growing up was a recipe of my Grandma's called "Tortillas and Sour Cream." This WW recipe tasted just like it, but it had chicken and black beans added to it. I took some in to work with me the next day, and it tasted great as leftovers, too. Two thumbs up! (Photo is from the WW website).

FITNESS

It wasn't a very good week for me fitness-wise. I had a nasty head-cold and felt like death-warmed-over most of the week. Each morning I would spend about 30 minutes to an hour coughing up all the gunk that had accumulated in my chest and sinuses over the night, so I didn't go to Command PT. Luckily, I maintained my weight. I suspect dehydration may have been a factor in that though.

This morning, I was still coughing a little bit, but doing much better than last week, and I really wanted to start running again. We didn't have our usual Monday Command PT because it's a holiday, so I decided to go for a run out on the bike path. I forced myself to jog at least the first 1.5 miles to get ready for the upcoming PRT, but I was coughing a lot and had to stop and walk the remainder of my usual 4-mile route after that. I coughed all the rest of the way home. Maybe it was too much too soon after being sick, but I really felt like I needed to get SOME form of exercise.

Warning: Tangent Ahead. This post soon departs the "fitness" topic at hand...

It's actually been a while since I ran on the bike path. I've normally just been going to Command PT and running on the base or on the treadmill at the gym. Running on the bike path made me think of another "pro" to add to the list for moving back to the east coast. I miss the nice, clean paths and the fresh air in the parks in Virginia and lots of other places on the mainland. You would think in a place with as much natural beauty as Hawaii that the residents would be more respectful of the environment and not just totally trash the place. I suppose if they've never traveled anyplace else, then maybe they don't appreciate the beauty of their home state. It just makes me sad to see so much trash along the sides of the bike path and elsewhere around the island, and the stench that comes from the trash makes me nauseous. I wonder if that's why the boys don't like to go running with me here like they did in Virginia?

It also surprised me that they don't have a recycling program here. I think everyplace we've been stationed before this had SOME form of a recycling program where the city picks up recycling right alongside your trash can. Not here. If you want to recycle here, you've gotta do it on your own and take the stuff in to a recycling center like at the NEX. At least you get some cash-back that way, but they still won't accept nearly as many types of recyclable products as they would in our previous duty stations.

Okay, sorry, I'll get off my environmentalist soap box for now.

I hope you all enjoyed your holiday weekend!