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The Revenge of the Return of Ranger Joe Strikes Back

(Be patient, for I know not what I am doing.)

DC 2007

Linda asked me where I wanted to go for my birthday dinner. I said "Las Placitas!"

This is all well and good, except that Las Placitas isn't exactly a local eatery. It was my favorite restaurant when
I lived in Washington DC. My roommate and I would hit this place at least once a week, sometimes just the two
of us, sometimes with an entire entourage of space geeks. The marguritas would flow and the smell of sizzling fajitas
would fill the air. The place was always packed, even though it was just a little hole-in-the-wall place in what was then
a rather seedy area on Capitol Hill. Its pretty nice now, with many more restaurants and shops nearby.

As it happened, Linda had to go to Philadelphia and Baltimore to do a warehouse inventory. Since flights to
BWI  were relatively cheap, I tagged along, meeting Linda once her work was done. I flew out on Thursday
night, met Linda, and we got a hotel room in nearby Laurel, MD.

Friday morning we headed towards DC, skirting around on the Beltway on our way to Shenandoah National Park.
This was to be my first return to the park since I hung up my NPS Stetson. We stopped in Little Washington, VA,
the quaint little burg where the X and I first lived in 1994. The Rush River Gallery had a different name but the
building was still painted yellow like it was when we lived in the apartment above it. The people who now owned
the gallery found it amusing that I once lived upstairs. The items for sale were pretty much the same.


The weather was kinda crappy and there didn't seem to be much point in driving through the park in the fog,
so we stopped at the Thornton Gap Entrance Station and shot the breeze with the friendly ranger who was there on duty.
 She knew many of the names of people I had worked with, and some of them were still with the park.
 As it turns out, her father worked for the park in the sign shop.

Since we couldn't see much of anything along Skyline Drive, we headed down the other side of the mountain
into Luray and took a tour of the famous Luray Caverns, which I had never visited (even though I lived only
a few miles away.