My weekend

I spent the weekend in Maryland, visiting my sister Catherine and her husband Brian with my parents. It’s my sister’s birthday this coming Tuesday, and so our visit was going to be either this or next weekend, depending largely on the predicted weather. We thought for sure there wouldn’t be too much snow this weekend, so we decided to risk it.

We were very wrong.

It was a nice weekend, but it snowed an awful lot and disrupted most of our plans, and it also made for some very scary driving back to the hotel last night. I brought my camera (though not my laptop) along, though an opportunity to use it never presented itself.

For whatever reason, my sister just wanted to go shopping for clothes for her birthday, so after the five of us met up for lunch in Towson, my mother and her split for the nearby mall. My father, Brian, and I had planned to visit the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, to spend a few hours before meeting back up with the womenfolk for an early dinner. (TV’s Michael Gross calls it “a unique place where the adventure and magic of railroading comes alive every day.”) Unfortunately, by that point the roads were already pretty rough, and a quick call to the museum confirmed that it had closed early because of the weather.

So instead, we went to a local Wegmans grocery store. I know, the excitement never quits! It wasn’t terrible. I haven’t been in a Wegmans since leaving Pennsylvania, and it made me a little nostalgic. And for some strange reason, the store had a model train set attached to part of the ceiling. Why go to a museum when the railroading adventure and magic is right there?

We were eating at a tapas restaurant in Baltimore, so it made sense to head back there to wait, even if we were a little early. The restaurant connects to the Charles Theater in downtown Baltimore, which has a spacious (if that day slightly chilly) lobby, so we grabbed something to drink at the bar and headed next door to sit. We ended up waiting a couple of hours, actually — my sister really likes to shop — and joked that we probably could have seen a movie while we were there. We had to wait a little longer, then, for a table, but the food was really worth it. I’d eaten there once before, when I was in Washington, D.C., for a conference a couple of years back and Catherine and Brian drove the three of us there one night. (They live closer to D.C., but they’re both Towson alums and have friends in the Baltimore area.) Lots of really good food, much needed on a really cold night.

The roads still weren’t so great, however, and visibility was downright terrible, so the long drive to the hotel (and for my sister and husband back home, nearby) was especially tense. Somehow the windshield wiper fluid on my parents’ car stopped working, and the wiper blades themselves sort of froze, so it was a nervous hour or so back to Germantown. I didn’t even have to drive, and I was nervous the whole way there. I saw at least half a dozen cars abandoned along the roadside, at least one pickup truck that had clearly been run off the road into a ditch by its driver. But somehow we made it there in one piece (or five pieces?) and got a good night sleep.

We had breakfast this morning, then got to see Catherine and Brian’s new house. They moved in just back in September — because that’s what you want to do a few weeks before you get married, right? move? — and I’d never seen the place before. It’s nice, and makes me think I really do need to start seriously looking for an apartment of my own again. (But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.)

Then this afternoon we drove back — or rather my father did. I spent most of the drive reading the deeply entertaining Already Dead by Charlie Huston (after I finished reading Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge on the car ride up). Now I think I’m going to turn my attention to the New York Times crossword puzzle and, later, dinner.

How was your weekend?