A novel concept: Show up for dinner on the day you actually made reservations for.
7:30 AM - Up and refreshed after a pretty good sleep. We will see if the wife feels the same when she gets up. I guess I was snoring again, even with my CPAP mask on, which is unusual. I know this because I was awakened by a pillow shot from Grouchy Bear during the night and told to “fix (my) fucking mask” or something along those lines. Perhaps I had mistakenly turned down the flow of oxygen, I am not sure, but hopefully when I turned it up and went back to sleep the snoring was gone and she could get some sleep. As I sit here and type this, I honestly don’t know which member of the Bear family is going to emerge from hibernation this morning :)
I’ve said it before and it bears repeating, no pun intended: How can my snoring be such a bother to someone who wears earplugs to bed and can sleep through a fire alarm?? I guess I have to find a way to make my snoring much, much louder and more like a siren.
8:45 AM - She is up and we are, sadly, greeted with perhaps the worst of the family, Dizzy Bear. Another unfortunate, albeit rare, side effect of the medication. This could definitely put a damper on some of our plans today, as Dizzy Bear ain’t going on any rides, but hopefully this will subside. I head down to the lobby to pick up our packages from yesterday, which we had shipped back to the hotel, and to pick up some pastries for breakfast. It behooves us to have a light breakfast today, with lunch at the Carthay Circle and dinner at Napa Rose on the itinerary.
Our plan for the morning is to go into DCA and check out the Fastpass situation. Perhaps will we be able to take in a show and enjoy the sights from the comfort of an Air Conditioned building. It is going to be flirting with 100 degrees today so neither of us is going to want to be in the bright sun for long stretches of time.
After Dizzy Bear made it through a repeat-experience of Soarin’ , which is still awesome, we head up to the Hyperion Theatre for a performance of Frozen Live! It is really good, and they managed to get all of the main plot points of the story condensed into 60 minutes. The girls playing Anna and Elsa are not going to make anyone forget Idina Menzel and Kirsten Bell, but they were still very good.
1:20: We check in for our lunch reservations at Carthay Circle. While waiting in the lounge, I notice they have an extensive “by the glass” wine list, and a special page of 4 high-end wines that you can get by the ounce! Yes, BY THE OUNCE! For $21, you can get an ounce of 2014 Opus One! For $66, you can get 5-ounces, and it is only $330 for a bottle! Now, some of you are saying “What do you mean ONLY $330, you moron?” . Well, you could not possible get a bottle of Opus One FROM THE WINERY for less than that, and to get it at less than retail on a restaurant menu? IN DISNEYLAND? Unheard of!!
We are shortly escorted upstairs to our table where we are presented with the full wine menu and OH MY GOD THE WINE IS SO CHEAP!! I think I had forgotten how reasonable the wine prices were here. We end up ordering a bottle of 2013 Almaviva, a high-end red blend from Chile. It costs $116. For comparison sake, I just bought a bottle of this wine (the 2015 vintage) from wine.com for $129.99! And to get this back home would cost $199.99 or more. How can a restaurant sell wine for less than retail??? What a spectacular deal.
In addition to the Almaviva, we order two 5-ounce glasses of Opus One, and we drink both wines side by side paired with our lunch, which is a lovely Thai Sirloin steak dish. Both wines are just fantastic. For full details on them, you will just have to read my wine blog when I am home and do a full report.
After lunch we stop at the front desk and try to see if there is any way we can get in here for dinner tomorrow night. They are booked, but they give us a couple of good ideas to try. We will be back at 5 PM when dinner service starts to try to get a table, and worse case scenario we will just sit in the lunch with a cheese plate and a bottle of Opus One. There are worse ways to spend a “dinner” !!!
Let me tell you, Napa Rose is going to have it’s work cut out for it to try to come close to matching the wine that we just had for lunch! What a treat! And, as a bonus, the wine actually took away the last lingering bit of dizziness that Tracey was experiencing, so Dizzy Bear has been fully replaced by Contented Bear. That is quite an upgrade :)
5:30 PM - Back in the room and time for a short nap before Tracey has to get up and begin “The Process - Fancy Dinner Edition, Take 2 TM”.
8:00 PM - At Napa Rose and it’s actually time for our reservation this time. We are seated at the Chef’s Table, with two other people, a young half-Vietnamese girl who lives in Florida and her male ex-co-worker, who lives here.
Wait, you may be asking, how the fuck would Dean know that the random stranger sitting next to him is half-Vietnamese? More on that later.
The food begins coming and the wine is flowing. Our excellent waiter has been informed what they are serving us (we didn’t order anything, they asked us what we liked and didn’t like and they are setting the menu from there), and he is pairing the wines with that.
As the evening starts, we get to talking with our table mates and we quickly find out that Carolyn, who is sitting next to me, seriously knows her shit when it comes to wine. Her friend is a self-described “beer guy” so the wine is newer to him. She is from here but lives in Florida, and you KNOW that Trump came up and she has some issues with people working for her who are supporters of the Cheeto In Chief. We mentioned that
Anyway, as dinner wears on we get very friendly with them, even tasting each other’s wine (and I know that grosses some people out, but honestly it doesn’t bother me in the least unless the person I am sharing with is showing obvious signs of the flu!!!) and chatting throughout. The entire evening was terrrific, made even better by the company of our new friends. What a delightful evening.
I will have full food and wine details, including pictures, on my wine blog when I am home and have time to upload the pictures and review the wines. One of my courses was Filet of Buffalo, with Buffalo tongue as an accompaniment. Carolyn, who loves that kind of thing, was desperate to taste my tongue, and told me my tongue was amazing. That actually happened.
Her friend, Donovan, also thoroughly enjoyed my tongue.
That also actually happened.
Oh, and did I mention that Donovan is a hockey fan? His favourite team?
THE FUCKING NEW JERSEY DEVILS!!!!!
What are the odds, do you think, of us sitting next to a guy from California who is a fan of the Devils, and Martin Brodeur specifically? Fuck my password for almost everything was Brodeur30 for like a decade (don’t test that, it is NOT currently my password for anything).
Back in the room and I am updating the blog before it is time to try to get a good sleep. Tomorrow is our last full day here before we head home and we want to make sure we get to everything we have yet to tackle. Another absolutely fantastic day!
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