bopeepsheep's friends in the credits at the end.
When my aunt came back home, we asked if she minded looking after
smallclanger for a bit while we went out to explore the mall.
Unfortunately, when we got back she told us that he had been shouting
from virtually the moment we left until we got back.
On Tuesday we headed back up to York - via DC's traffic jams, Baltimore,
and the I-83. We also went through some fairly heavy rain showers
and, as we got further North, some sleet. On the way, we found
Arundel Mills (not far from BWI airport) and went shopping at
Carters - where else? But this time we were shopping on behalf of
k425 and, armed with a 20%-off coupon, we also added to
our stash of stuff which is possibly going on eBay to help out those
poor Carters-deprived shoppers in the UK. We also found the
games shop which buzzy_bee told us about, and bought a spare
Chrononauts set at 40% off (though I had to hang
around in the shop for 10 minutes before anyone appeared behind the
till).
As we got into Pennsylvania there was snow on the ground. We had a quick look at some bits of historic York before stopping at Marcia's house. When we got there we were fed lasagna and then we saw some bits of American Idol while chatting about this and that. We got to see a bit more of Marcia's two daughters. One of them is currently raising money in order to go on a Student Ambassadors trip to Australia and New Zealand, and as part of this M is baking pies and selling them.
We went to bed relatively early to catch up on sleep. The next day, armed with
an apple pie (in exchange for a $10 donation - she didn't want to accept
the cash but we insisted), we went out to Lancaster again and visited a certain
shop there. We went through the town centre again and then took a road towards
the village of Little Britain
to take a picture of the road sign - not very successfully because I never
seemed to be able to stop at the right places. Next stop was Hershey, where we
went to the famous Chocolate World and came away with one or two items of
confectionary. It has been said that the whole town smells of
chocolate, but I didn't notice - this clearly doesn't apply when it is
snowing. We ate the little freebies of milk chocolate which we were
given at the end of the tour, and we agreed that there seemed to be
something odd about the taste (bopeepsheep described it as
`parmesan' and I'll stick with that description because mine is ruder).
Good old British chocolate is definitely better. Hershey's dark
chocolate isn't bad, though - for some reason it's just the milk
chocolate that is funny.
From there we set off in the vague direction of home via Gettysburg.
Unfortunately it was going dark by the time we passed through Gettysburg, so
although we saw some fields and lots of cannons, we didn't stop and see
anything specific. Then back down South on route 15, while thinking about
looking for somewhere to stop for dinner. Now if you are on an Interstate, you
get little signs at every exit telling you what restaurants or fast-food
outlets you can find there. Sadly, you don't get this on lesser routes, so we
were more or less limited to what we could see on the road - which wasn't much,
and we had definitely decided against going to McDonalds or Burger King.
I stopped at a couple of strip malls on the way down, only to find they didn't
have restaurants in them. smallclanger was getting agitated,
and started shouting. `When we get to Leesburg, there's an outlet mall
there and there's bound to be somewhere we can eat,' said bopeepsheep.
But when we got there, we had no idea where this mall was. We drove through
the town and ended up on route 28 which goes past Dulles airport.
Somewhere near there I turned off and found - guess what - a Burger King.
So we parked in their lot while J calmed the hysterical baby down by
feeding him and I nipped in to get a milk shake for her.
We pressed on via Manassas and so to the I-95. I passed all the signs that only said McDonalds and finally found one that looked promising. There was a very large retail-park area and the first restaurant I saw was Ruby Tuesday's, so we went in and had our dinner. The baby had some too (they even brought us some hot water so we could warm it up a bit) and we changed him so he was nice and comfortable for the last leg of the journey. It was well after midnight when we finally arrived back in Richmond, and we went straight to bed.