This was probably my favorite MTTS day, so far.
The morning event was kinda… meh. Nothing amazing, but nothing bad either. MINI had breakfast available… Breakfast sandwiches… but Brian and I had eaten a GF breakfast at the hotel. Actually, Brian did… I was feeling a little off this morning and didn’t want to upset my tummy with eggs and bacon.
We started out at the Richmond International Raceway. Everyone actually got in their cars and got moving quicker this morning… or maybe we were just further up in the pack than we have been… We hopped on the track for our lap… and right back off. We didn’t even get to go all the way around! AND we had a bunch of pokey puppies in front of us, so we never even made it up to highway speeds! I shot the track video in Time-Lapse mode just to try something different… Good thing, it made the lap look so much more exciting.
Richmond International Raceway video
We followed MINI’s driving directions today and really enjoyed driving the back roads through Virginia.
Our afternoon Surprise & Delight was at Belmont Farm Distillery. Brian wasn’t too excited about moonshine, but I wanted to try it.
It was a fun little side trip, but it was jam packed with MINIs and the place just wasn’t big enough for us all. There was only ONE port-a-potty. ONE!
I sampled the Apple Pie Moonshine and the Apple Pie Whiskey. I might have liked to try a few others, but it was $5.25 for the two little samples as it was.
After we left the distillery we left the pack and detoured into Washington D.C. It was…. disappointing. The drivers are bat-shit-crazy. Not a one of them knows how to use their damned blinkers. There are busses and pedestrians and bicycles zipping in and out of traffic. Then there are all these one way streets….
For safety and sanity sake we decide to park and take a bus tour around the city.
We saw the White House… It was pretty… but we couldn’t really see it well. There was a big fence and lots of Secret Service guys.
We only hopped off the bus a couple of times It was hot and there were tourist, homeless people and… I dunno… other random people that live there, I guess?? Lots of people! Everywhere! We know how I feel about crowds! I don’t like crowds. And by now my ‘off’ feeling had developed into a headache and I had to break my No Soda streak and drank a Sprite to settle my brain and tummy.
We drove around other buildings… Old ones… Important ones….
I actually took more photos on the ‘big’ camera… These are just the ones on my phone. I think we made it past the Lincoln Memorial too… There were a lot of buildings and monuments and important things… but my head was really starting to hurt and I finally realized that… Ya know… Maybe I hadn’t eaten hardly anything today…. Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel good….. I’m not always the brightest. In my defense.. Sometimes I feel a bit off and it means I shouldn’t eat… of course, usually it means I should eat, but it always feels like a bad idea. At any rate, I was over the bus tour and I just wanted to go find food. And sirens! Did I mention the sirens?! Every damn time we turned around there were sirens! Echoing around the buildings…. racing past us…My poor head.
We found a cute little pizza place and had dinner and a couple of gallons of water. Did I mention that it was hot?
After dinner we left DC and headed for the evening event in Baltimore, Maryland. I was happy to leave Washington behind. Maybe it would be interesting to come back some time and see all the museums… maybe there is a quieter time of year? Probably when the kids are back in school. I’ll have to look it up….
The evening event was held at the B&O Railroad Museum. I wasn’t really excited abut this one, but Brian is a fan of basically anything with wheels and complicated mechanics. MINI had a really nice dinner available and while I was trying to find the water bottles I wandered across a table of French fries with assorted toppings…. I couldn’t resist cheese fries. And then I saw they were serving chicken, ham or roast beef… It was supposed to be for sandwiches, but the guy sliced me several nice sliced of roast beef and I found dill pickles… And was pretty much in heaven. Brian was kinda looking at my like I was nuts since I’d left most of my pizza at dinner… but this just looked so good… and as soon as I ate it… my headache went away. Cheese fries cure headaches! Brian says maybe I should have eaten one of the other three meals that I had a shot at during the day…. but I doubt that would have worked…. It was most likely the cheese fries that saved me. (Or the giant hunk of protein from the roast beef…)
Since I felt so much better we roamed around the railroad museum for quite a while.
I’m pretty sure Brian has figured out how to take all the trains apart and how they all work by now. He kept trying to show me how stuff worked and I kept trying to see if I could jump up into one of the rail cars…. In a past life, Brian would have been the engineer… I’d have bee the hobo trying to hitch a ride…. And probably getting run over by the train… Unless I was much taller in that life…
All in all, another interesting day!
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