7/11/2014
Several circumstances have conspired to prevent any trips
this year, but the dream lives on. A month ago we had our fifth child, Brigid,
who decided to come a little early. As such, although Laura is home, Brigid is
still in the NICU so we don’t want to go too far from home right now. (Speaking
of home, we also bought a house last month, so it’s already been a summer to
remember, even without Patricia’s guidance.)
Given everything that is going on we even considered
cancelling our annual August Marietta trip, until we received an email from
Barking Dog (yes, I’m on their mailing list). The email said they were closing
their doors forever on July 12th! After a lot of thought, we decided
it might be good for the family to get away for an afternoon, so the August
Marietta trip was back on – except in July. Whoo! I would say “Whoo-hoo!” but
we were sad we couldn’t bring Brigid with us, so we’ll have to settle for just “Whoo.”
Our first stop this time was Marietta’s Soda Museum. Yes.
That’s a thing. But, a free thing. It’s basically a fifties-style soda shop,
filled with tons of soda (mostly Coca-Cola) memorabilia. The kids all had
ice-cream.
Don’t worry. We didn’t forget about Veronica.
The woman and the two teenage girls working there were
really friendly, and into our kids. It was a nice little place. We’ll
definitely stop by again.
After the Soda Museum we took the kids over to the
Whipple Toy Store. Daniel remembered the rain storm from the last time he was
there, which is kind of amazing since he was barely 3 then. The Toy Store is
made out of an old train, so the kids ran around playing train for a little
bit.
We drove over to the Antique Mall and picked up a few fun
things for our new house, and then took a little walk down the main street. My
Favorite Things still have the creepy dolls, but the kids were comparing which
ones looked more or less like baby Brigid, so that warmed our hearts to them a
little bit. (It is worth mentioning that they actually hand-make the dolls in
the store, by the way, which is kind of cool.) We took a sad look into The Tin
Rabbit. It was still open, but the sign out front said it was for sale. Hours
were listed as “By chance.” The man who ran it last year was still there, but
he looked unhappy. The poor guy.
We had our annual dinner at Austyn’s, before heading over
to Barking Dog for their last hurrah. Most of the shop was packed up in boxes,
but they still had a lot of great books for me to salivate over. We left with
an extremely heavy box of extremely discounted treasure. We wished the owners
well in their retirement, and we sensed a general atmosphere from the customers
(the place was packed) that they would be missed. “How can we not have a
bookstore in a college town?” someone lamented. Laura asked the male owner what
he was going to do now. He said, “I can finally read my books.” Good on him!
This particular weekend there was going to be a boat
race, so the riverbank was closed off. We couldn’t get too close to the river,
but we watched some of the boats (presumably practicing) zooming by. We didn’t
want to stay too late anyway, so we could get to the hospital.
All in all, it was a fun trip, but Marietta sure is
changing. So are we, of course. We wish Brigid could have been with us. Next
year, baby girl!
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