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quick semi-ironic meal
Sunday, January 8 2012
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Before we left on our road trip, I went around the house cleaning up if for no other reason than to give ourselves a nice house to return to. Our friend Sarah the Vegan would also hopefully be coming over occasionally to socialize with the cats, and Andrea would be coming by in the morning to feed them, and it's always best to leave the house clean for such occasions as well.
The only critters we'd be leaving home would be the four male cats and Sylvia. The dogs and Marie (aka "the Baby") would be coming with us. As always, we set up a litter box for the Baby on the floor behind the driver's seat, though this time I also lay down a sheet of plastic (the Baby prefers to defecate immediately outside her litter box). We weren't far down the road before the Baby took advantage of both of these facilities. In the space of five minutes she vomitted and then explosively diarrheaed (the only form her defecation ever takes). Happily, we'd brought plenty of paper towels and Gretchen was able to clean most of it up without us ever having to pull over, though this meant she had to throw the besmirched towels from the window along the NY Thruway (as there was no thick-walled hermetically-sealable container available in the car).
We got gas at the first rest area on the Garden State Parkway a short way into New Jersey. It being one of those left-exit rest areas crammed between the north and south-bound lanes, there wasn't much in the way of green space for running the dogs, so we ended up having to walk them on leashes on a bowling-lane-sized median strip with about as many cigarette butts as blades of grass. While there, we ate a quick semi-ironic meal of veggie burgers and fries at the Burger King (we would have preferred an bigger, even more ironic meal at an Olive Garden, but there didn't appear to be any along our route).
The road proved unusually kind, without the slightest bit of congestion for the entire route. The New Jersey Turnpike (which normally has a 70% likelihood of congestion somewhere) had almost post-apocalyptic traffic levels.
Gretchen's parents were gone on a vacation in a much warmer climate; the whole idea for our coming down was to escape the colder climate of the Hudson Valley and hang out in their enormous well-heated house while taking advantage of urban delights denied to us in our less metropolitan adopted homeland. One of those delights was the Burmese restaurant known as Mandalay (right there in Silver Spring), and that was where we had dinner tonight. Gretchen was so excited about the menu that she ordered four entreés, though we were so hungry that we didn't even end up taking much of it home with us.
We ordered everything spiced "medium" except for the room-temperature tofu, which at "spicy," was so chemically hot that I used it as a spice for the other dishes.
We also ordered cosmo-style mixed drinks, though mine was so girlie and sticky with sugar that I vowed to next time pick wine. (The IPA revolution has yet to reach Silver Spring; Mandalay only stocked the decidedly-inferior Red Hook Long Hammer IPA.)
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