Back from the Burg
// May 4th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Journal
Spent the weekend in the midst of the Blue Ridge mountains this past weekend with Krystle, visiting good ole Virginia Tech. Feels like an entire lifetime ago that I was walking across that stage in Cassell Coliseum to shake hands with the faculty and grab my diploma. In the span of almost precisely four years, I: found the woman of my dreams; married her; adopted a Labrador Retriever and a litter of three kittens; worked at two companies; sold my lily white virgin-mobile and bought a CR-V; and we’re now expecting our first child in a mere manner of months. Crazy how life twists and turns.
The campus was pretty quiet on Saturday as we walked through the greens and pathways that linked the numerous dormitories over by the West End food-court. There was that all-too-familiar background tension in the air that reeked of finals being a little over a week away and closing fast. It was oddly surreal to stand in front of the festering hole that is Pritchard Hall, stare up at my first room away from home on the seventh floor, and notice that the student living there now has the exact same model of fan jammed into his window that I had when I lived there in the fall of 2001. I wonder if that floor still reeks of pot, Natty light, and clogged showers like it used to. I do NOT miss having to wear flip flops to take a shower, I’ll tell you that right now.
Every step through that campus brought back a ream of memories. Eating cheesesteaks every day for lunch at Owens for an entire damn semester, going to my first frat party at Theta Xi and drinking my first beer there (Pabst Blue Ribbon, natch), waking up one morning in September of my freshman year and watching as planes flew into the World Trade Center on my battered 13″ television, just reams of shit. I remember all of this, and then I think it’s pretty strange that my experiences are completely divorced from Krystle’s. We have similar memories of the same places: seeing movies at the Lyric and the cheapo student union, eating at the same restaurants, even taking some of the same classes – but we never knew eachother until we met on-line years later in Northern Virginia. Although, I’m around 99% sure that her sister, Jaime, used to serve me Subway sandwiches one summer when I was taking classes and working at 4Help to pay the bills. Now THAT shit is funny!
Anyways, it was a great trip. We drove down Friday morning and promptly lunched at Macado’s. The Big Daddy sandwich was, unsurprisingly, money in a bun. That night we met up with some friends (among them, my best Twitter buddy, Katie [@kathleenfoucart], and her new-ish husband – the venerable JoeGTN1) at The Cellar for some spaghetti with GIGANTIC meatballs, a few pitchers of beer, and some great conversation. After sleeping it off, we walked around campus for most of Saturday and got some great shots in the overcast sky. As the afternoon waned, we played a few rounds of pool in Squire’s, where Krystle was impressed to find out that I used to be a member of both the Pool Shark League AND the Dance Dance Revolution Ladder. That night, we grabbed Mexico and drove an ass-long way out to the Home Place for dinner. We waited about an hour to get in, but the home-cooked Southern fare more than made up for it. Goddamn delicious.
And that was about it. We checked out this morning, grabbed some coffee at Mill Mountain, drove up, got our pooch out of the doggy clink, and Krystle’s now sleeping it off. I miss the Burg, but I think we’re planning on going back in the Fall, if Krystle’s not too round by then. All I know is, it doesn’t matter where we live in 18 years, my girl/boy is going to be a damn Hokie, even if it costs 30 gigabucks a year in tuition.
