Just Pull the Trigger, Baby.

So our wine weekend ended with a bang when J and I took a detour to the shooting range.  All decked out in massive earphones and armed with a real live .22, I annihilated a cardboard man.

This was not the plan.  But I kind of liked it.

We had a good weekend, and it was so amazingly nice to be away.  We were in Southern Pennsylvania, just across the Maryland border, in a bed and breakfast that used to be an old railroad hotel and, an article I read said, a brothel.  

This is especially amusing since there was some kind of a mix-up with our reservation, and we ended up being upgraded to the Bordello Room.  It was so called because the room was decorated in a 30s and 40s-era pin-up girl theme, but I couldn’t help but find the reference outright hilarious.  Especially since all of the other guests were older married couples.  J slept in this morning, so I was at breakfast alone, and they were all asking where my husband was.  He’s … um … still sleeping, I’d say, furtively hiding my give-away left hand beneath the table.

We visited some of the historic railroad cities, and toured some wineries.  It was good, and we have some bottles brought home to show for it.  I’m a bit of a wine snob, though, and while Pennsylvania gives a really good effort—go there for the experience.  True, I regularly drink really cheap wine, and I’ve been known to throw myself in front of bottles my dad is staged to pour out as “undrinkable.” “NO!” I’ll shriek.  “We’ll drink it! Save the wine!”  This is how my law school roommate and I underwrote many drunken evenings in, in fact: dad’s reject wine.

But still.  I turned 21 in Washington Wine Country, and I’ve spent spring break in Napa.  I’m spoiled, and I know a good vintage when I meet it.

We’d had about all we (and the fast-filling crate in the trunk) could take by about 2, and the idea of returning to DC was just so wholly depressing we started paging through the local paper over a late lunch.   

That’s when J saw an ad for the shooting range.  “Your Second Amendment Connection,” it was subtitled. 

I’d never held a gun before, and I admit I was a bit freaked out by the whole idea.  He sold me on safety.  Every girl should know how to handle a handgun, he said; you may need to disarm the enemy, or protect yourself; you’ve got to know what you’re dealing with.  All true.  So we went, I destroyed the cutout man, and I actually enjoyed it.  In fact, I intend to go again sometime. Maybe not often and maybe not soon, but again.  I’m not too bad a shot, it turns out. 

I’m thinking of pinning up my destroyed target in my office.  Somewhere inauspicious, like on the back of the door.  I can’t be drinking the wine at work, but I’ll be damned if I can’t be remembering some of the weekend’s stress releases more perpetually.