I suppose we’ve reached a bit of a milestone in our infant son’s life. Our first national holiday together! Memorial Day may not be the biggest such event, but it turned out pretty awesome nonetheless…
At the last minute, I got an invite to see a friend’s band at a local venue. Normally, this wouldn’t have been a “let’s bring baby” event for us, but this particular band is an acoustic duo that plays covers from the last thirty years, and they happened to be playing at Hofbrau, an improbably on-the-nose looking Bavarian Chalet on Warner Lake. Then, even more last minute, we discovered that a bunch of of our friends a) had never experienced the sublime joy of a visit to Moxie’s gourmet ice cream stand (which opens Memorial Day weekend) and b) unexpectedly had their plans fall through for the holiday.
So, as if by magic, we had a plan! The team assembled at our place at 1 PM, and headed off to Moxie’s. We were the very first patrons of the holiday, and got our amazing frozen treats almost immediately on arrival. We sat in the sun, talked, and enjoyed. Dashiell even had his first taste of real food (if you count melted ice cream as food). He was sadly unimpressed, but we assume that his infant taste buds simply haven’t had time to develop an appreciation for the finer things yet…
Once we were done with ice cream, we saddled up once again for the hour drive to Warner Lake. The clouds disappeared, and the drive was a beautiful, leisurely meander through the woods and farmlands of the Helderberg Escarpment. Hofbrau is as inviting as advertised, an amazing replica of a Bavarian chalet in the middle of nowhere, perched at the edge of a beautiful little lake. The menu was a *slight* disappointment, having only one actual German dish on it, but it made up for this lack with at least one passable German beer (Warsteiner) and the spectacular and unique culinary innovation of wrapping all of their hot sandwiches and burgers in potato dough before deep-frying them!
We sat on the deck in the warm Spring sun, looking out over the lake, listening to awesome live music, drinking beer, and eating sinfully good food. We ran into more friends, and chatted for hours. We spent the entire afternoon and a good chunk of the evening out there, and Dashiell was a perfect angel, mostly sleeping and occasionally opening his eyes just long enough to charm the pants off anyone nearby.
All-in-all, an idyllic, almost storybook day.
