This past weekend
was a nice getaway for Sharon and me. Friday I was able to work from home and get off early so we could head up to Marietta to visit Sharon’s parents and friends. The drive up was the worst commute I have had to date. It usually takes us about 2-2.5 hours to get there from where we are living in Virginia, but it took us over 4 hours to get there Friday afternoon. There were accidents everywhere, or potential for them. We pass the DC temple on our way, which is normally a half hour drive, but it took us a good hour to get there this time around because a moving van had broken down in the middle of the highway and was sitting there with its hazards on. A little further down the road, about the time we got on 95 headed north toward Baltimore traffic slowed to stop & crawl mode again because of a fender bender right where there was a bunch of merging lanes. We enjoyed a couple of miles of normal traffic after that, until it slowed to again. This time we were lucky, because it we had been much later we might have been stuck a lot longer. An RV and the truck pulling it had flipped. As we were slowing down we saw the first emergency vehicles blaring their way to the scene. As we inched along more and more of them kept showing up, in the end the 4 lane highway was down to 1 lane and the shoulder of the road. We were lucky not to be in anything, but unlucky to be in a car without air conditioning on the hottest weekend so far this summer.
It was good we left early because Friday night we had a date at the opening night for the newly formed Marietta theater company, The Susquehanna Stage Company. They put on ‘The Music Man’. It was directed by Sharon’s old High School director and included many of her friends from Marietta growing up. Marian was, and still is, one of Sharon’s best friends growing up, Nichole. We enjoyed watching it and they really did a nice job. It was fun because Marietta is in some ways similar to ‘River City’.
Saturday we got in the car and drove through New Jersey, the corner of Connecticut, and New York to Caramoor, where there is a nice summer music festival with concerts in the beautiful gardens of an old estate. The music selections were generally geared toward families with children. Two of Sharon’s cousins were part of the festival. Michael Barrett, a protégé of Leonard Bernstein, conducted and I believe, was the organizer of the festival. He also does a festival in Moab, UT.Their opening piece was by a French composer who wrote a ‘mock’ symphony with about 20 short movements, each representing different past times. It had two dancers who were acting out the past times in a very entertaining fashion. Sharon’s cousin, Michelle Ellsworth, was one of the dancers.
Their second piece was ‘Peter and the Wolf’. They did a nice job and they had a great narrator.
It had been awhile since I had heard the whole thing with the narration. I realized my idea of the story was incorrect from my childhood. I always pictured it taking place in the winter with snow, etc. but listening to the narration it made it sound more like a summer setting with the duck swimming in the pond.We made it back to DC Sunday night without any accidents. The only traffic was caused by a chair in the middle of the road, the things people let fall by the wayside.
You can find more pictures of our adventure this weekend and from DC in our album.
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Pandora is a kind of internet radio/ music discovery tool that I've been using for a couple of year. You can define your own stations by typing in bands and songs you already know and they start playing songs from that band and others with similar characteristics.
