20-III-2010.
The big trip to the embassy. We need the blue, FRY, passports, which should expire by the end of the year, but we'd pay only 35$ for each of the three of us (her, Lena and me), and we'd get them on the spot. There are new biometric passports of Serbia, with embedded chip and whatnot, but the government seems to have just a couple of machines which make them, and the embassies have to send all requests to Belgrade. The embassies belong to ministry of exterior, but the passport service to the interior, so the inter-ministry communication adds a few weeks to the process, and then they have to hitch a ride in diplomatic mail... all in all, three months, which we can't risk. And these cost 230$, too.
It's equinoxe, and we arrange to meet Burt in Warrenton, because he has a traditional meeting with his fellow amateur astronomers. We get in by a wrong exit from the 29, but Warrenton isn't a huge town and we actually grab some ten minutes to get sandwiches at Subway. We meet at Starbuck's with a minute to spare - what a programmer am I if I'm so on time? - and he happily accepts her offer to take the other half of my sandwich. „Excellent! I did have a breakfast but not lunch“. Then accepted half of hers, too. Then went off to buy a cake, for himself only. Then again, a soda. Then she went in and bought some cakes.
And then we drove twenty-some miles to that pasture or whatever. It's a horse farm, where they got a lawn far enough from any lights, and a spot where there's no horseshit, so the telescopes can be used properly.
I got to watch the moon, and Orion. Both look really good. The chemtrails were low on the horizon, but were dismissed as no problem in general. They seem to cover the blind spot.
Fujica has clocked its 10000th shot there. Actually no, went straight form 9999th to 10001st. Doesn't ring the zero*.
Since we felt cold, we went in search of a hotel... which took a while. We dropped by Nissan pavillion (strange name for a place) and ended on some kind of industrial road. Then Gaynsville, which we're supposed to be familar with, that's where the 29 from A-burg joins the I-66, but the only hotel they have is too posh. Since we needed only a bed, we searched on, Manassas now. We drove through before, when we visited Jose more often, that's where the shortcut from A-burg goes. They did have two roads with the same number - one through (am. thru), one around. It's customary to mark them differently, usually the thru one is „business“ - no such thing in Manassas. No hotel either. We went the štrafta all the way through and back, and eventually saw one hotel, and another behind it, says next right... oh well, there are three exits to the right, and they all look like parking lot entrances, and the advertisements for everything else are much larger, nothing looks like a drive to lead behind the shops... aha, here's the fourth one. The fourth one got us back to I-66.
We found a hotel in Fairfax, thinking we're in Falls Church, where once I went for a job interview, and we found something, okay, a 100$ a night... but can't smoke anywhere in the building. The pillows were thick, I found my head on its corner in the morning. We kept covering and uncovering ourselves all night, it's all synthetic, even the woodwork was plastic.
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The joke goes:
- when did you come home last night?
- At ten.
- I heard just one bell.
- well the bell boy isn't nuts to ring a zero.
Mentions: Annenburg (A-burg), Fujica, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Jose Bariero, Reginald Burton Cape (Burt), štrafta, in serbian