Three Hour Tour

Finding out I'm going down to Paul's dad's for Labor Day reminded me that I have yet to tell about our previous trip down there. And my birthday weekend. And this past weekend. I'm such a slacker. Okay let's tackle the first one.

The weekend of August 5-7:
Paul and I both took that Friday off to take a trip down to visit his father in NC. Paul came over Thursday night which was nice. We haven't been having a lot of time together so spending an evening in together was great. We headed to Union Station Friday morning and had breakfast before hopping on the train. This is the point in the story where it goes bad. I realized I didn't have my iPod. For a 6 hour train ride. I picked up a cheesy, mindless magazine (Cosmo) and a puzzle book and hoped for the best in train mates. Sigh.

The train was really packed, but luckily we were able to find seats together and Paul was "kind" enough to let me have the window seat (I played the iPodless girl card). Things weren't too bad until an hour or so into the trip when the Satan's spawn a couple rows behind us decided that he needed to yell and scream at the top of his lungs for his mother, who happened to be sitting right next to him. Then, in what can only be described as an effort to calm him down, the mother let him run up and down the train aisle. All I can say is that brat is lucky I was at the window or my foot might have stretched out into the aisle. After an hour or two of that, the older brother, again in an attempt to quell the savage beast that was this four year old, moved seats away from the rest of the family to, you guessed it, RIGHT BEHIND US. It was at this point Paul turned to me and asked "Does God hate you?". I was thinking the same thing. I got fed up and walked through a couple cars looking for two empty seats. In the third car I found them and made Paul move. I was much happier the rest of the trip. Before you get all "Oh, Plan B, they're just kids" on me you need to realize this was beyond a kid being a kid - it was awful. Plus my hypoglycemia was kicking in since it was past 4 and I hadn't eaten since 9. I was pretty impressed with how much I held back. Moving on.

Paul's dad picked us up at the train station and then took us out to dinner. We had a lovely meal. I know I've said this before, but I really like his dad. The next day (Saturday) we went to check out the almost finished new house his dad is having built. It is going to be a really nice home. Very spacious and airy and right on a golf course. After that, we headed to the marina where his sailboat is docked and set sail for a day on the water. I was so looking forward to that! I haven't been out on a boat for a very long time and I really, really miss it. We were just starting to motor out of the harbor when we got called back by the harbor master. Turns out a valve wasn't opened when we started out and it was causing the engine to overheat. We got the engine to cool down and headed out once again. It was so much fun. We got caught in a bit of a storm which actually was great - it cooled us down a bit, even if we did get soaked. I had forgotten how much I love sailing. It's so calming and relaxing. Even when the boat feels as though it is going to tip over (which I know it won't, but Paul seemed concerned a couple of times - damn sharks). We started to head back to shore (which was in sight the entire time) when the motor died. Wouldn't really have been a problem but for the fact there was no wind. So we slowly drifted back to shore over the next two hours. Hey - at least we got to lay in the sun and dry off from the storm, right?

We were all pretty wiped from our day at sea so we grilled and watched movies and went to bed pretty early. The next day Paul's dad was kind enough to drive us back to DC. His reasoning was this - 2 hours to the train station (4 hours round trip for him) + 6 hours on the train = 8 hours travel for us. It would only be about 9 round trip for him to drive us back so he took one for the team and brought us back. We were home hours before we were scheduled to be which was great.

So that was the weekend at Paul's dad's in brief. It was a nice, relaxing weekend which is exactly what we needed. I love getting out of the city!