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Moving In
It’s a feature well known that when you move into a new place, for every box you carry in and unpack, you drink a beer. Okay, maybe that was true in my college days–or was that just the price extracted by my erstwhile friends for hauling around my stuff? The stuff has multiplied, and we…
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Northern Neck Burgers
It’s the afternoon of the Saturday before the time change, and it’s a calm, cool day, with a bright sun that warms us only a little bit as we sit at a picnic table outside NN Burger in Tappahannock. The pups are leashed up and watching the boys play cornhole. You can tell it’s all…
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Gone Fishin’
Sometimes you need a break…a real Saturday morning evoking your childhood–complete with a bowl of Lucky Charms, sleeping in, and watching cartoons. Okay, so I didn’t do any of those things last Saturday, but I did walk over to the neighbor’s dock, where my love was tying a swivel to the line on a second…
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Toast to a B-17
An incredibly tragic accident last week took a legendary airplane, her crew, and her passengers into a fiery landing up in Connecticut. Though I didn’t know the pilots of the Boeing B-17 Nine-O-Nine, many of my friends did–and we all felt their loss as keenly as a collective heartbreak. Historic aircraft fly on the wings…
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Make-A-Wish
We’re always up for a charitable way to mix philanthropy and beer (or wine), so when my friend Lori put it out there that she planned to hike 28.something crazy miles to raise funds for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, we asked, “Great. Where’s the beer?” She answered, “Down in Greensboro, you silly kids.” Actually, she and…
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King Bao & Brews
Actually, the title of the story is purposefully misleading: I did not drink any beer at King Bao on East Colonial in Orlando last week–mostly because they don’t serve any alcohol. That should in no way stop you from enjoying the pillowy folded pancakes of joy the next time you’re in the neighborhood. Try any…
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Cervezas La Pedriza
North of Madrid lie mountains. The city reminds me of Denver, in its position on a high plain, backed up by large-scale rocks beckoning you out of the bustle and into the hills. My love had once lived in Madrid, and climbed on the walls and boulders around La Pedriza. My modest climbing career had…
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Alhambras in Zafarraya
The drive over the tracks took us up and around the mountains…just getting out of our friends’ house near the shadows of La Maroma, the grand mountain in the Sierras de Tejeda. The lady turns purple in the sunset, but we had the full afternoon sun upon her as we set out. This corner of…
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Byrrh in Catalonia
The colors of Collioure in France have drawn artists and those with any heart for a century or longer. They drew us in on the apex of a drive through Catalonia during August, and completely melted my heart. But the town is more complex than a few restaurants along the front, the street market on…
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Sangria on La Rambla
You’ll forgive us if we forgot to ask for no straws. The August sun beat onto us as we stepped out onto La Rambla from our hotel in Barcelona. A quirk of planning meant we would spend the night there on our way from a glorious week in Collioure, France, to the south of Spain.…
