Category: photography

Early fall weekend in the Blue Ridge

So since the U2 concert was on Thursday we decided to make a long weekend out of this trip to Charlottesville. We stayed the whole time in this cute bed and breakfast nestled in the mountains a quick drive off of I-64 and the Blue Ridge Parkway called the Iris Inn. We get full breakfast every morning and have a nice room with a bunch of windows that let in lots of light and a pretty view of the woods in the morning.

VA Route 814 on the way to Crabtree Falls

The Friday after the concert we decided to head up into the mountains for a hike after breakfast.
We chatted with some of the other couples at breakfast about where to go and decided to head to Crabtree Falls after a bit of internet searching. The Falls were about an hour away from where we were so we Googled for directions and wanted to stay off the interstates so we took the second recommended route which took us on five miles of dirt road along a mountainside that looked like the map screenshot on the right here, quite an interesting drive.

We arrived at the trailhead around 11:30am and had a great hike up to the top of the mountain. The trail was a series of switchbacks and each time you would finish one you would get a new view of the falls, 5 or 6 times you go back and forth and after about 3 hours we reached the top (with probably an hour of that just taking pictures, which will be up on Flickr soon). We snacked on granola bars at the top and then made it back down in under 45 minutes.

Once we got back to the Inn and got cleaned up we headed into downtown Charlottesville to the Belmont district to go to this great restaurant we’d found last time we were here called Mas Tapas. The food there is amazing and a lot of it is locally sourced. The place opened at 5:30 and after our hike we were starving so we were there just after they opened and managed to get one of the last open tables before the waiting list started (by the time we left there were at least a dozen people outside waiting for tables, it’s really that good). We managed to snag our order sheet back from our server so here is are the six dishes we had with our bottle of Castell del Remei Gotim Bru 2006 (very tasty and a very good price):

  • Pan al horno (our cold-fermented, hand-crafted bread, baked with natural starters in our wood-fired brick oven daily)
  • Datil con tocino (dates wrapped in applewood smoked bacon, roasted till crispy)
  • Queso con alcachofas (roasted artichoke hearts, garlic, sweet onion, olive oil and goat cheese spread with bread)
  • Salchicha a la parilla (the eponymous Spanish country sausage – air-cured, dry-aged with smoked pimenton, olive oil and pork)
  • Lomo en capa (Angus beef tenderloin with espresso-smoked pimenton crust, pan-seared rare only with pico de gallo)
  • Mejillones con sofrito (Farm-raised Pacific Penn Cove mussels cooked in a smoky sofrito sauce with our brick oven bread)

And it was all amazing tasting. And we had a warm strawberry-rhubarb pastry thing for dessert, and if you know me and my obsession with (especially Trader Joe’s) strawberry-rhubarb pie that was definitely a treat. The restaurant has been voted best in Charlottesville this year for best appetizer (the bacon-wrapped dates), best service, best “small plates” and best service, and it definitely deserves all of those accolades.

Today we met up with my parents and did a bit of winery touring around the Madison area where Jeremy went to high school. We met my parents at Prince Michel winery right off of Route 29 and enjoyed a rather extensive tasting there, 3 pages of wines! And the great part was they only charge you $1 and that’s only if you do the “reserve” page of wines. We ended up buying 3 bottles of their Cab Sav and then we headed to the famous Pig ‘n Steak for a late lunch (and to get some food in our bellies to absorb all that wine 😉 ).

After starting off with a sampler appetizer platter of fried pickles, fried olives and fried broccoli (with cheese inside of course) we enjoyed bbq and burgers and mountains of fries before heading out to the final destination of the afternoon, Sweely Estate Winery. The tasting room was beautiful and the whole building was newly built with a huge reception hall on one side all in stone and big timbers, a nice mix of modern aesthetic with traditional materials. We were so stuffed from lunch we sat out on the back patio for a half hour or so letting our food settle before heading in for the $4 tasting of 9 wines. The wines there were pretty good, we all preferred the whites over the reds I think, but that may have been due more to the fact we were so full of food and wine that by the time we got to the reds there was just no more room in our stomachs. We parted ways with my parents after finishing the tasting and took a nice scenic route (not as scenic as good ol’ 814, all paved) back to the Inn. We stopped at the grocery store in Waynesboro on the way back and grabbed some cheese and crackers as a snack but we never ended up having any. We sat up on the “observation deck”, a little 3rd floor balcony off on one side of the Inn and watched the sun set over the mountains and then walked down to a lower deck with a swing and sat and read our books for a while in the cool evening before heading in for the night. A very nice, quiet and peaceful way to end a most excellent weekend before heading back to the ‘burg.

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soup results and vegetable stock

So dinner is done and I have to say, it was quite tasty. I followed my plan mentioned in the prior post and chopped and sauteed the zucchini and squash in the same pan I browned and cooked the sausage in and I think that really added a lot of flavor to the dish. Served it with some (store bought) garlic bread and it made a very nice, filling, and moderately healthy meal. And I have enough leftovers for about 4 more meals even after sending 2 servings home with Jeremy.

I also ended up making the vegetable stock today as well as my started-off-as-minestrone-ended-up-more-a-vegetable soup. I didn’t have enough onion based on various stock recipes I’d found so I walked over to Trader Joe’s for a small bag of onions and quartered 3 of those, together with the half onion I had left over from the soup as the start of the stock.

Veggies Before Veggies After
Vegetables for stock, before roasting Vegetables for stock, after roasting

I then third-ed all of the remaining celery and carrots on the bias (to get more surface area exposed) and peeled and separated a half head of garlic and tossed it all together with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper and stuck it in a 425 degree oven for about half an hour to get all kinds of good roasted flavors out of the veggies first.
Once they were ready I added just enough water to cover all of the vegetables to my big stock pot, added just about every dried herb I had in my pantry (rosemary, thyme, herbs de provance, bay leaves, random herb packet from Fresh Market, whole peppercorns and kosher salt) and got everything up to a simmer and let it go for an hour (more than that and, according to the internet, the vegetables get mushy and become bitter).

After the hour was up I made a quick ice bath in my kitchen sink (much to the chagrin of the cats, pouring ice into a stainless steel sink is very loud), strained the stock into a metal bowl and cooled things off as quickly as possible then divided the stock up into ice cube trays and a quart plastic container for later use (very tasty as base for rice or risotto), also added a bit of it to the minestrone as it was a bit low on broth after adding all of the vegetables and sausage. Overall, the cooking day was a success I think and all of the photos are posted on my Flickr page.

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Adventures in Latvia – picture note

Many of you may already know via my twitter feed (@tb623) but all of my photos from the trip are now on my Flickr page:

In total, posted over 250 pictures. I tried to balance out between putting up lots of pictures so that everything we did was documented and to also put up pictures I thought turned out really well.

Jeremy also has his photos up, broken out in about the same way, on his Flickr page.

Hope you all enjoyed following my adventures in Latvia, it was a great couple of days. Until next time!

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Adventures in Latvia – day 4 part 4

So after passing the two gates we caravaned to the ruins of an old castle where Robert and Laura encountered their “exes”, a guy and a girl dressed very goofily who lamented their lost love and cried how they had broken their hearts. The two people who did it were hilarious but after they determined they could not break up the new couple they instead led them to the entrance of the ruins where a string was pulled across the entryway. Robert and Laura were each given five ribbons to tie to the string and with each ribbon they had to say something they loved aboutthe other person. Most of the things were sweet and expected but the last comment Robert made was that Laura “had really great breasts”, Jim, Jeremy and I just about died laughing. After all the ribbons were tied they were allowed in where they had to sit and write down “sins they had committed before they met”…Robert finished a few minutes after Laura 😉

After that the photographer took them to take pictures around the ruins, this was also the point when my camera started acting up. Every few shots I would get “Error 99, please turn off the camera and turn it back on or reinstall the battery”. I restart the camera, change the battery, change the memory card, take the lens off and clean the contacts, nothing seems to work, so I’m thinking oh great, my camera is going to die halfway through the wedding. Jeremy googled the error and it’s the default error the camera gives, so not much help. We finally try swapping lenses and that seemed to fix things, so apparently there is something amiss with my general purpose lens, will have to try and fix it when I get back to the States.

Anyway, once photos were done we drove to a nearby grocery store for the next task. There was a large crowd of people who blocked the way into the store, they sang a song to the wedding party and then Dita (the maid of honor) “paid them off” with chocolates as she had done with the other neighbors. Once they got into the store Robert and Laura were each given one Lat and they had to try and buy everything they would need for their first meal together. After much running around the store (and encountering another wedding party doing the same thing) they both succeeded, Robert spending 99 cents and Laura spending 98. Turns out the blockade had actually been for the other wedding party but in the spirit of the day they had stopped our wedding party as well. It was a very fun observation that everyone in the town seems to celebrate with the couple, people on the roads would honk as our caravan (the gold Lincoln in front, all the other cars behind with white ribbons on their antennas) drove past as well.

We then drove to a bridge where Laura and Robert had to each find a large rock that they then tossed into the water. We were near a meadow so the couple went and took pictures while we waited and waved at the passing cars when they honked their congratulations. One if the cars we saw approaching was the caravan from the other wedding, so to return the blockading favor from the grocery store a bunch of the girls stood in the middle of the road and blocked the other couple’s car. They got out and had to say something to each other (it was in Latvian so not sure what they said) and then they “paid off” our blockade with a small bottle of orange vodka (which we later learned was drunk by Robert, Jim and Dita in the limo on the way to the reception).

The next stop was at a crossroads between Riga and Liepaja. The bride and groom were each given a padlock which they locked together and then they took the keys and stood on opposite sides of the highway and tried to flag down a car. Robert flagged down a car first and (with Gunta translating) gave his key to the driver so that his lock could never be unlinked from Laura’s, and after a few minutes laura successfully did the same. Thought that was a very sweet tradition, and later in Liepaja we noticed one of the bridges had a bunch of chains and padlocks left on the railings and I think it is from this same tradition, perhaps with them throwing the keys in the river instead.

At this point the caravan left the limo to head to the reception but according to Jim they went to another bridge where they tossed in some of the flowers they had received from one of the gates and threw in the list of sins they had written earlier to mark a clean slate for their new life together.

Now, the reception….

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Adventures in Latvia – day 4 part 2

So once we made it out of Liepaja we drove through the countryside for twenty minutes or so before pulling into a driveway to a small Methodist chapel tucked in the woods (Laura and many of her friends are Methodist and worked at the nearby Wesley Camp during the summers). The church was all concrete and built in the early 1900s and had been seized by the Soviets and used as a gymnasium but when Latvia regained it’s independence the church reclaimed the building (if you could prove ownership of a building then you could reclaim it).

The inside was decorated with flowers and small saplings that Laura’s parents had cut the day before so it almost felt like you were outside. When the ceremony started Robert walked in followed by Jim and Laura’s little brother Marecks, then the bridesmaids, then Laura, escorted by Pastor Joe, an American who had worked with Laura for many years at the Wesley Camp (her stepfather was too shy to escort her). The ceremony was a pretty traditional Christian ceremony, with readings from the Bible which the Latvian pastor would say then Laura’s friend Gunta would translate to English. At the end was the traditional kiss and then everyone went outside and took pictures, not just the bridal party but each guest got to take photos with the bride and groom in front of the chapel. Then everyone began the journey to the reception hall, and that is the next post 🙂

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behold, the results

So I finally managed to get some pictures taken of the courtyard yesterday, so here are the highlights (all the pics are on my flickr page)…

top view (note all the pipes and stuff behind the screen):

top view

onlookers:

onlookers

the patio furniture (“conversation set”):

patio furniture

the planter box (and hosta):

the planter box

the trellis:

the trellis

begonias:

begonias

impatients:

impatients

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