Avocado Toast and Chai

From there we headed to Richmond, and had dinner at a brasserie.  We met our old friend Mike, from Opcode, Saturday morning, meeting at a place which definitely had fresh-squeezed orange juice.  It also had an entire section on its menu dedicated to avocado toast.  They were quite generous with the avocado; ours also had radishes on it.  When did avocado toast become shorthand for everything Trump voters hate?  It seems arbitrary, but “Insensitivity bordering on cruelty to displaced industrial workers trying to raise families” takes too long to say.

We then spent a few hours at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which had a great Art Deco furniture collection, a large Tiffany collection including four eggs, and much more.  And then off to Mike and Val’s place in Reston, in the Virginia suburbs of D.C.

Sunday we drove into D.C. and met our friend Seth, also from the Opcode days.  He was there with his 15-yr-old programmer son Austin.  We had some excellent vegetables and fish at Ethiopic, and then proceeded halfway down the block to Sidamo, where we had great coffee (espresso-based, and also traditionally-brewed Ethopian-style) and Sidamo Chai Leben, which was pretty sweet but very interestingly spiced.  Afterwards, we went to the National Gallery of Art, parked nearby on the street, and saw the Sally Mann exhibition, and part of an exhibition on “Outliers”, which was mostly about the reactions of “professional” artists to “outsider art”.  We drove back to Reston, and walked to a neighborhood place in a small mall.

Monday we said goodbye, drove back to the National Mall, accepted how much it would cost to park, parking someplace which was unnecessarily far away, and returned to the National Gallery to complete the “outliers” and to see as much other stuff as we could in the amount of time we had.  We stopped at a Bolivian restaurant in Falls Church for lunch, put gas in the car, and returned it to Dulles, where we began the pair of Southwest flights taking us home via Denver, arriving in SF at 12:30 AM.  My friend Kahlil was sweet and picked us up and took us home.