Welcome to Virginia!

I arrived at Reagan National Airport in Washington DC at around 3:15pm on Saturday, June 25. The flight was fine, made a connection in Detroit, and while there was a bit of rough air ("Flight attendants please take your seats" is something you don't like to hear during beverage service), it was a pretty uneventful trip.

Mark and Kay picked me up and we went back to the house - which is gorgeous - before dinner. I had the best manicotti EVER at Villa Bella.

My room:



Today we did a practice drive to the train station where, just an FYI to the VRE people, BOTH ticket machines were out of order. So Mark and I drove to the next station to buy my first 5-day train pass on the VRE. I'll take the 7:00 train tomorrow to be safe, and after that I think I'll be able to take the 7:30 train. It's about a quarter-mile walk from Union Station to C-SPAN headquarters (according to Google Maps).

For lunch today we went up to Maryland and visited some of Kay's friends - they are from Nepal (and some other friends from Japan - all of whom are flying out of the country this week!). The father is a famous (in his country) Nepalese folk singer, and they cooked a traditional Nepalese dinner. New food of the day? Tofu. I couldn't bring myself to eat the fishy noodle thing, but I'm sure if I were a seafood person it would have been delicious. I had a lot of chicken, and I was surprised (and pleased) to find that the spices on one of the chicken dishes tasted REALLY similar to a dish I had made for my 7th graders last year (2009-2010) during our study of southeast Asia!



We then had a Swiss Chocolate Cake (from a Swiss Bakery in Burke). That was pretty much amazing. To balance out our international cuisine for the day Mark made Black Angus steaks for supper. Grilled to perfection, we also had salads and baked potatoes. I had some asian pear slices for dessert, although Mark will be back shortly for cheesecake.

So this first post ended up being mostly about food, and you will continue to see those types of details, I'm sure, since Kay is an amazing cook. However, since I'll be on my way to C-SPAN Headquarters in less than 12 hours, I'm sure I'll have much more to talk about tomorrow.