Liralen's Adventures Through Life

We got up a little earlier than usual because we knew we'd have to go a good number of miles before we got where we had to be that night. I'd also been pretty disappointed by Whisk the previous morning, so I looked through all the food magazines in the hotel and found Brown's Court Bakery . Two words: Sriracha Croissant. It was a classical bakery in one of those classical Charleston floor plan houses, with the narrow front to the street, and the open porches and true front door on the "side" of the house, allowing for outdoor access year-round. The interior was wide open, too, employing the concept of hot air rising, to let all the hotter air in the house rise to the top floor and get vented up there. Tall vaulted ceilings in the top floor helped give more room for the hot air to be away from the people. What I truly loved, though was seeing the flour in a pile right there in the front sales room. Jet got the tangy, buttery, sriracha croissant and a hot choc

John and I have this habit, on vacations, of just going to an area and then discerning what's interesting in this new place and going to explore that with intensity. We've done this repeatedly: flying into Hawaii, knowing we had a free resort setup but little else, flying into Mexico with just our suitcases and asking the taxi guy where a cheap and good hotel was, and flying into London and lugging our luggage to a garret room with shared bathroom for a night before deciding to drive over 1000 miles all over the tiny island. China was an exception for us, and I think I now realize that I might have resented that in some small part, but also was grateful for it, though I spoke as much Spanish as I do Mandarin and we got by fine in Mexico. Still, China's government makes it a bit more difficult to go anywhere without requisitioned permissions. So, we started wandering the way we usually do...

It was interesting, this time around, that "going on vacation" actually meant a great deal more than usual. Ever since the flood, John's been working a pretty steady work week, sometimes even including Saturdays when local churches offered work parties for jobs that were available. So these last two weeks were really "time off" when it hasn't been that way for a long time. As a quick starter: these enormous Filley-Rostykus reunions started way way back, and had their roots in the times when Isabel and George would take their four boys across country in a station wagon to go back to Isabel's mother's home. Walt, John, and Isabel were all sibling and they would gather whenever the Rostykus clan made its way to the East Coast. One of the earlier ones I knew was when Isabel's mother turned 100, and as much of the clan as possible would gather. This particular reunion started about a year ago, and had its seeds within the reunion that myJohn organiz