After stopping briefly at the South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia welcome centers, we stopped for a few hours in Richmond, VA.  The first priority was dinner, and in order to describe my choice of restaurants, a bit of back story is in order:

Since I try not to be profane around the children, my “go to” inappropriate word to provide levity in times of turmoil is “bottom.”  Examples go like this:

child:  “DADDY!  She’s ruining my train tracks!”
me:  “My bottom likes to ruin train tracks.”

child:  “Daddy, I want cake for dinner!”
me:  “My bottom wants cake for dinner.”

These have, accordingly, become what the children reference as “bottom jokes.”  These one-liners went over well for about a year or two, but more recently, any use of bottom jokes gets a chorus of “DADDY!  NO MORE BOTTOM JOKES!” with gritted teeth and serious eyebrows.

So, naturally, when I stopped the car in Richmond, Virginia after 8.5 hours of driving and told them we were eating at a place called “Bottoms Up,” I was greeted with groans and disbelief.  Until they walked inside and saw individual slices of pizza the size of cereal boxes.

head offered for scale

It was delicious–all $80 (+ tip) of our meal there.  We boxed the leftovers and walked across the street to the canal system and sidewalks near the James River.  My 5-year-old boy enjoyed the train tracks.

We enjoyed the full moon.  We drove by the capitol building designed by Thomas Jefferson.  We saw St. John’s Church, where Patrick Henry requested liberty or death.

Then we retired to our Fairfield Inn at Fredericksburg at 9:45pm.  Our first day of traveling was complete.