Fred and Valerie

We went camping in Shenandoah National Park over the Memorial Day holiday weekend with our lovely new camping gear that we mostly got as wedding gifts. We set up our tent at Loft Mountain Campground and had a wonderful time. On Saturday, we enjoyed a good hike and saw an amazing view from an overlook along the Frazier Discovery Trail.

All in all, a great weekend!

Congratulations on the culmination of four years of hard work. We’re very proud of you and you should be very proud of yourself. Good luck and remember that we’re always here for you.

We almost got in an accident tonight. I mean, we ALMOST got in an accident tonight.

We were driving the Stratus along I-64 East. We were on our way to go pick up the Mazda as it had some repair work done to it. We arrived at our exit and, as we did so, I saw a car coming up the entrance ramp to the interstate. This particular exit, in this particular direction, is basically your typical cloverleaf design. In fact, this is the exit. We were heading towards the bottom-right part of the cloverleaf while the other car was heading up the bottom-left part of the cloverleaf.

And this is where things started to go wrong. As I got closer to the exit, I saw the other car’s brake lights briefly light up. I didn’t think much about it because this sort of thing happens from time to time with people who have a hard time merging with traffic. But, the car continued along and it seemed best for me to “exit early” so that I could get behind the car and not have to worry about them suddenly pulling into my lane as I was passing by; another common action from those who have a hard time merging.

Easy enough. I pull into the exit/entrance lane behind the car and all is going well. And then the car, that’s now in front of me, stops. STOPS! We’re not talking about slowing down like the car was doing initially. We’re talking S-T-O-P-P-E-D!

Thankfully, I was pretty much alone on the interstate (a rarity around 5:00 in the evening) and I hit my brakes, laid into the horn, and swerved to the left. As I passed the car, I looked to see a teenager in the driver’s seat with what I assumed to be her mother in the passenger seat.

I can only imagine that the teenager was a new driver. After all, it’s not like she’s got decades of driving experience under her belt at that age. So, I don’t blame her. Not at all. BUT, I do blame her mother, or whoever that passenger was, for what happened. The moment that adult felt the car slowing down in the entrance ramp (the first time), she should have told the teenager to speed up as slowing down would cause a more dangerous situation.

Hopefully, the woman told the teenager this bit of advice later, but they both almost got the lesson the hard way. I swear Valerie could have reached out and honked THEIR horn as we passed them. We were THAT close to an accident; a bad accident.

I bought The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family to help me “get in the spirit” for our honeymoon trip to Italy and Croatia. Specifically, I wanted a book that was regional to the area we’d be visiting without being a disguise, or just straight-up, a cookbook. This book delivered on all fronts and made for an enjoyable read. One of the ports we were to visit, Portofino, is very near Genoa, which is a city that the author visits several times in her search for her family’s lost ravioli recipes. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to visit Portofino on our trip, so I had to use the book to pain the picture we never got to see.

Though it’s mostly a story of the search for a family’s cooking history, there is also a cookbook and appendix of learned cooking techniques to close out the book.