Since moving to Maryland from Northern Virgina I have had two problems:

1). Finding good restaurants, and

2). Find a good beer store.

Jennifer and I are slowly trying out some of the lesser known restaurants and mostly avoid the chain places.  Back in NoVA we had found a bunch of places we really, really liked.  I guess this sort of this just takes time.  So far we’ve found one place we absolutely love, Victoria’s Gastro Pub, and we’re looking for some more.  I enjoyed Coal Fire Pizza which is new in Ellicott City/Columbia, but Jennifer has yet to try it as we don’t eat much pizza.  Also, from the BaltimoreBeerGuy’s site (discussed below) I found a Howard County food blogger, so I’m totally going to start reading that as well.

On the beer front, I have been very unsuccessful.  Everyone says go to Cooridor, but I was largely disappointed.  A buddy said to check out a place in Clarksville, but I found it the same as every other liquor store.  However, I have a hot lead… And while searching for the address to this lead, I came across a fellow beer fan’s site which I really enjoyed… and he also thought it a good place.  So I’m off to check it out and maybe get a few decent beers I’ve never tried before.

Wish me luck!

Jennifer and I had a nice Fourth of July weekend.  We went to the pool, relaxed, took naps and fired up the grill pretty much non-stop.  Grilling is fun.

We did go down to the Columbia MD fireworks for a little while, long enough to see that it was a complete zoo.  We parked over a the mall for a strategic quick exit and then walked to the lakefront.  By the time we had got to the lake front we knew we’d be better of watching from the mall parking lot.  The crowds were enormous even walking through them was almost impossible.  A police or medical emergency in that crowd would have been devastating.  And a panic there, and people would seriously have died.  It was amazingly poorly managed from a crowd control perspective and the authorities in charge should be ashamed.

All that said, the fireworks themselves were nice and our quick escape route worked well getting us well out in front of the crowds.

Next year we’ll go try laurel or maybe somewhere a little more rural in hopes of less crowds and more well thought out crowd control.