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Road Trip!
Nov. 4th, 2025 10:20 am
Fabulous Deecey-Virginia trip.
Trip down somewhat problematic as the Poughkeepsie train station was out of parking places, so I had to limp in the rain on mysteriously injured leg a mile and a half from adjunct street parking place to the train, plus my Penn Station train was an hour and a half late due to coastal New Jersey track flooding.
However:
Shaken! Not stirred.
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The next day was Halloween. We took a stroll around Alex's neighborhood.
Alex lives in a city that was founded in colonial times (though no traces remain of that). For the first 150 years or so, it remained a bucolic settlement surrounded by tobacco fields until time and proximity to the corridors of power in nearby Washington, D.C. transformed it—inevitably!—into a residential commuter hub. (I imagine in those early, pre-WWII days, the commuting was all done by trolley.)
Alex lives in a charming brick house that was built to house the earliest residential commuters. It is the house her husband grew up in.
Some of Alex's neighbors take Halloween very seriously:
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BKox5nPBQ/
Then it was time for the main event: Trick or Treat!!!!
Skeleton costumes are like the Chanel suit or the little black cocktail dress of the Halloween universe, so I didn't have to pay much attention to my own plumage.
Other members of the household went far more elaborate—in particular, Alex's beautiful daughter H who could easily snag a job as a double when Chappell Roan makes her cinematic debut:
Even after (conservative estimate) 80 or so trick-or-treaters, the Bottomless Candy Bucket didn't give out. Though the stragglers had to make due with Dum-Dums.
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Most of the places people visit in the Deecey area are closed due to the government shutdown. (And you might think the Trump administration would have better taste than to host a Great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago mere hours before food benefits lapsed for 14.2 million Americans due to said government shutdown. But if you thought that, you'd be wrong.)
The ones that are funded through their own foundations remain open, and among those is Gunston Hall, the ancestral home of Founding Father George Mason, whose name I vaguely remembered from the John Adams & Benjamin Franklin bios I devoured last summer.
Before the Gilded Age, American mansions were not particularly imposing:
But this one is located on magnificently beautiful grounds::
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BYoVZJRwG/
Fun factoids learned at Gunston Manor:
(1) This (to me somewhat hideous) shade of green was the most popular for the houses of the ultra-wealthy in the late 18th & early 19th centuries because the pigment was made from copper verdigris, and thus the paint was very expensive:
(2) Alex is the great great great great great great great great grandaughter of George Mason. She learned this long after she started visiting Gunston Hall! I do not see the resemblance.
The next day, we went thrifting!
Alex is like the Queen of Thrifters, so this was very much like taking a master painting class from Rembrandt.
In the evenings, we watched the BBC's version of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I have seen before but could watch endlessly (even though it completely fucks up the ending), such a dithering fan girl am I.
I was convinced Alex would love it!
And either Alex did, or Alex is such a good hostess that she pretended to with a magnificent display of sincerity to please her guest.
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Anyway, terrific time. Which will give my heart resistance since the next two and a half weeks are promising to be quite the slog. Sigh...
