Scavenger Hunt

 Logistically, it should have taken 30 minutes, tops. Drive there, pick-up dinner, pick-up cookies, drive back. Low-stress, high-reward [which really is part of the draw with enjoying restaurant food--no need to stress, because you're not cooking].

That's not what happened.

The plan for the evening had started with me noticing a Texas-themed restaurant on Too Good To Go [rescue food in your area from  participating restaurants and pay a third the price!]. Then, while looking up how to get there on Google Maps, I saw that a cookie shop was just around the corner from our destination. Dinner, dessert--it's a date!

What I hadn't considered is the nightlife of Adams Morgan [an area, not the person] on a Friday night. Or, more specifically, the nightlife's impact on parking. 

Mark drove down streets, up streets, through intersections, and down alleys while we searched for some place to put the car. Nothing. The streets [which is where all the parking is, because in designing the area, nobody had anticipated cars] had cars bumper-to-bumper along the edges. We hunted for parking for probably a full 20 minutes before I had the idea to find a grocery store, use its underground parking--meaning we made a detour inside the store to purchase some deodorant so that we could say we were in fact shopping there--and hike the third-of-a-mile to the Texas place.

[Which , by the way, deserves a sentence or two on it, as it is truly an unexpected establishment. It's in the basement of some building, but there isn't any indoor space besides the kitchen, so you order and pick-up your food at a window at ground level. Literally ground level--I had to squat.]

For unknown reasons--maybe the place was short-handed and overloaded with orders, or maybe the stove broke down--getting the food took a while. Once I had identified myself as someone picking up an order placed on Too Good To Go, the cook estimated it would take 7-10 minutes. Technically, I did not time it, but based on how many times I changed positions, or brought up a new topic to talk about with Mark, I'm going to guess it was closer to 30.

Finally, a guy brought out the bag of food--which smelled deliciously like potatoes--and Mark and I hoofed it over to the cookie store [okay, it was probably 40 feet away. No hoofing needed]. We selected our cookies, hoofed it [for real] back to the grocery store, where we decided we probably needed to purchase something again because you can only access the garage by going through the store. So we added a gallon of milk to our bag, got back to the car, and went home with our finds.

It was extremely fortunate for my mood that all of the food was good, but that didn't change my announcement that we not have a scavenger hunt date again for at least 3 months. Maybe 6.