In part because we needed a holiday and in part because it was my birthday we were whisked away to Charlottesville for the weekend.
Friday was my actual birthday. On Thursday Jeremy had roses delivered to my work.
Happy Birthday roses
While driving to Charlottesville my phone was blowing up with notifications from FaceBook, and text messages from friends and co-workers
My tech savvy niece sent me a happy birthday face… is that a headlamp? I see a future trail runner there.
jeans shopping- dress rehearsal
My patient, wonderful husband tackled the daunting task of jeans shopping with me. Ladies, you’ll understand my angst here… I introduced Jeremy to the world of odd and even sizing, various cuts, colors, fabric where you might go up a size in one pair of pants and down a size in the same brand but different cut… I believe we spent 2-3 hours on Friday discovering what works and what doesn’t work… until we realized all of the pants I tried on had been bedazzled. Fashion industry?!?! Come on… a bedazzler? Didn’t we use these in junior high?!?! I digress… we counted the day a success and acknowledged that we’d probably be on this hunt for a few more months before we reached a resolution. We discovered that the three stores we attempted were not suited to our tastes and decided to move on to dinner.
dinner at Mas- before we head to a city we pick out 2-3 activities/things to do/see/taste/explore etc.. sometimes we get to all 3, sometimes we don’t… sometimes we add on more… or less, but we’ve found we enjoy having 3 pre-selected ideas just in case. One of those places this trip was Mas. A restaurant off the beaten path in Charlottesville… the serve tapas. Let’s be honest, it had our names written all over it. Unfortunately we were so hungry and the dishes were amazing so no pics of the food… but it was great.
Saturday
Jordan had received a recommendation from a friend to check out MudHouse for coffee… so we did.
It was a pretty amazing experience. We ended up across from each other at a long table full of people on either side of us, sipping our hand pour of the coffee du jour while reading the news on our devices…
Since biscotti is anything but filling we followed up our coffee adventure with brunch at Shebeen
Oh. My. Goodness. This was one of the best breakfasts I’ve had in a REALLY long. time. He ordered the smoked salmon with a poached egg and I ordered the crab cake eggs Benedict. Wow. I mean, can we go back for these dishes… now?
On Saturday we hit the mall for jeans shopping round two and ended up…. winning! After trying on what felt like 50 pairs of jeans I found 4 that we both really were grateful to buy. (Now I can wait another 10 years to go through that again, right?)
One of the places I had my heart set on visiting while we were in C’ville was: dinner at The Local. We arrived at the restaurant around 530 and discovered we needed a reservation. Ugh. We put our names on a will-call and dejectedly left to find nourishment elsewhere… Just as we pulled in to the parking lot of the runner up restaurant we received a call saying they had an open table! My cup runneth over, I was ecstatic!
Her meal- a duck recipe with a blackberry sauce
His meal- a chicken recipe
Sunday
No trip to Charlottesville is complete without stopping at Trader Joes (twice?)… my “niece” Sophie has gotten me hooked on this wonderful snack:
Upon arriving home we found birthday cards in the mail and more arrived later including:
A Birthday Card hand draw for me by my wonderful Momma Hope
I do enjoy birthdays.
