What do a car wreck, The Music Man, and Peter and the Wolf have in common? I was in none of them this weekend, but I saw them.
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.
Sharon’s cousin, Mary, and her husband, Barney, came to DC for a little vacation before Barney starts his MBA and Mary gives birth to their first child. I got a few days off work so we could all go and play. We headed up to Marietta, PA to pick up Gabe a friend Sharon grew up with and the rest of us got to know when we all lived in the same apartment complex in Provo.
one day. We took the ferry over from Staten Island which allowed us to see the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. We then took the metro up to time square and got tickets to Phantom of the Opera (we tried to get into Wicked, but that didn’t happen). We had some New York pizza, went to Central Park, saw the Apple store, checked out the Trump Tower and its supper expensive ice cream shop (we passed on that for some Baskin Robins), saw ground Zero, and then headed home. 
New York was a packed day so we took Thursday nice and slow in Marietta. We visited Hersey, PA (really Derry, pronounced dairy, Township) and enjoyed the magic of Hershey’s Chocolate World. We stopped by Sharon’s old work, ‘The Country Table’, to get a taste of the Pennsylvania Dutch food. It was really good. That afternoon we headed back to Washington. More pictures can be found on our DC album for the summer.
