  How lame is this. I take nearly a 3 month hiatus from this blog and come back with a title like "my weekend? " It sounds like the title of something a first grader would turn in as a spelling exercise. Well, you get what you pay for. Seriously, I'm going to add some posts between my last one and this one to complete the Europe trip report and sum up what's been happenin with the man.
But for now you get what I did this weekend because it's fresh. I took a half day off at work on Friday so big Al and I could get a jumpstart on a road trip up to Radford, VA to visit Ali's college roommate and good friend Michelle. You could write a book about Michelle (and some pshychologist might someday) so I will say nothing more than Michelle is a unique individual. I went home with every intention of eating lunch, packing, and walking the dogs before Ali got home so we could leave as soon as she got ready.
(Why the rush you ask? Wine tasting starts at 5:30 I reply) I wound up getting sucked into this show on the urlLink National Geographic channel about these guys whose plane crashed at 11,000 feet on Mount McKinley (my people call it urlLink Denali ) and were stuck for several days in a blizzard. Two of the four perished and the others lost toes, fingers, legs, and the like to frostbite before they were rescued by a rag tag group of "mountain men" who where frustrated with the Army and Park Service failed attempts to rescue the ill equipped crash victims. Ultimately, one of the survivors sued the Army and Park Service for the botched rescue and won $50K a year for life.
The other guy became an alcoholic, sobered up, got prosthetic legs and took up.......mountain climbing. He revisited the site of the crash on a climb before eventually dying in a climbing accident. Crazy world we live in. Someone ought to sell tickets. Anyway, I did pack and walk the urlLink dogs (in the only downpour we've had in months....funny how that works) and Ali got home and off we went. We took my urlLink truck because of the risk of inclement weather (it's 4WD) and so I had to fill it up with gas. This is not normally something I would record for posterity but it reminds me of possibly my biggest pet peeve of all time: gas stations that put a cap on the amount of gas you can pump at one time. You see, my truck has a 34 gallon tank so a gas station who caps the amount of gas you can pump at $35 or even $50 (34 * $1.599 = $54.366) keeps me from completely filling my tank.
This means I have to stop more often to fill up. I don't live in urlLink NJ so I have to actually get out of my truck and stand in the cold to complete this task. You can see where I'm going with this. What gives? Are they concerned about drive aways? Is this something that the attendant has control over? Do I look suspicious? I am boycotting gas stations who do this. The only two I know of are the urlLink BP on Linville Rd.
and a urlLink Citgo on Silas Creek Parkway near urlLink Forsyth Tech . We made it up to urlLink Radford in a couple of hours. It rained the whole way but it is still a pretty drive. Michelle and her dog, Bear, gave us a warm welcome, and off we headed to dinner. We ate at Spinnakers, the hotel restaurant at Best Western, Radford, where Michelle's fiance Jason works.
The only interesting thing to note is that we met Jason (who was working) and found out that urlLink General Wesley Clark was scheduled to speak at the adjacent ballroom later that night. Weird place to solicit Democratic votes, but I guess that's what potential politicians do. We were were extremely late to the wine tasting. It was at a little gift shop on the main drag in Radford, I couldn't tell you the name of the shop or the street but I do recall that the featured chateau was urlLink Rockbridge . Mighty tasty - it's all blended stuff but Alison liked their blanc and I enjoyed their Tuscarora Red. We also found out that the wine tasting was indeed a wine/chocolate tasting. We neglected to have any chocolate because wine and chocolate didn't seem like a good combination at the time.
They were selling wine by the glass after you had sampled the wares and an appropriate amount of imbibing ensued. Michelle knew everybody at this place, which I believe is mostly attributable to the fact that Michelle generally seems to know a lot of people and that she works across the street from the wine tasting shop at a coffee shop that is apparently popular with the wine tasting crowd.
This coffee shop, which goes by the The Coffee Milll, was our next destination. Dot dot dash was playing at The Coffee Mill. They are an old-time/appalachian acoustic trio consisting of guitar, mandolin, and fiddle. An acquantance of ours from college is married to the mandolin player and the fiddle player used to teach geology at urlLink ASU where Michelle met him. He now teaches at urlLink Radford and the Radford academic crowd was out to hear their colleague. This night they were also featuring the wife of the fiddle player on the oboe. That's right, the oboe. Overall, the music was well played and enjoyable, but this has to be the dorkiest band on the planet.
Imagine a bunch of college science professor types rockin out on traditional tunes and trying to look cool They had no stage presence and for the most part kept their noses buried in their music stands while playing, but I'd go see them again for no other reason than they were having fun. The Coffee Mill is pretty cool, I am going to recommend it to my friends playing the coffee shop circuit as a potential venue. Upon leaving the place we participated in a hit and run accident in the downtown parking lot where we had parked (needless to say, Michelle was at the wheel) and made a quick beer run before retiring to Michelle's insanely smokey apartment.
Jason came home after work with surprisingly little news of the General Wesley Clark Experience and we all vegged for a while and alternately listened to Jason's self made cd (very urlLink pink floyd ) and watched the first urlLink LOTR flick. Saturday we came back and watched urlLink UNC urlLink beat urlLink Wake Forest (I never know who to pull for) and then watched urlLink Bridget Jones's Diary with Renee Zellweger and Windtalkers with Nicholas Cage. Neither did all that much for me but Diary was entertaining enough (big Al tells me the book is excellent) while urlLink Windtalkers was quite bad. The true events are more interesting than the movie. (It's about the code the Army used in WWII that was based on the urlLink Navajo language - they used Native Americans as communcations officers) Sunday found me deciding to learn to play the harmonica as well as practicing urlLink mandolin and urlLink guitar . 
