Side Trip to Philly, Dinner in the Dining Car

View from the diner window

Lamp over each booth

On our way back from visiting our son in Pennsylvania, we occasionally stop at a diner, The Dining Car, for a quiet meal and to avoid the local traffic that clogs up Route 95 during the dinner hour. One of the reasons we like to eat here is that the food is edible and cheap, it seems clean, and the service is quick and they serve just about anything you might want in a diner. It's also barely a stone's throw from the main road so we don't feel like we are getting too far off our way and of course, it has lots of parking and you can tell from the car number plates that it's a local favorite. I can get a nice martini with my Cobb salad or french fries and it seems like the portions are not too large and not too small. My husband can get his onion soup too and he will settle for a Pepsi there, although he'll give the waitress a hard time about it being a non-Coke establishment. The customers don't look like customers in DC restaurants:  there's lots of groups of older people eating together, families with teen kids, twosomes of 60 year old guys, or trios of women in their 70s eating together so the ambiance doesn't feel like the capital city.  It makes me realize how the DC Demographic is quite different comparatively.  What's nice is the decor has some very nice deco elements too, such as in the lamps and the overall appearance of the building. We've also gotten our favorite BLTs and bought cookies in the bakery shop on our way out. So you can see, this is a very useful place for us to go on our travels.100 miles away from the capital city and you are in another part of God's country.  As it turns out, this diner is featured in Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives: An All-American Road Trip, a book listed on Amazon.com!  Who knew! I never read it but I hope the author gave them a good grade!

Glasses Needed for Views Reading

Image via Wikipedia

No matter how I try to keep track of them I lose my reading glasses. The solution has been to have multiple pairs in multiple locations since they are cheap enough, usually less than $20 a pair and in some cases I've bought three for a dollar! For cooking and detail housework I only need 1.75 or 2.00 magnification but for reading print I need 2.25. Anything higher tends to make me a bit nauseous. But this morning, all I could find were the red 2.25's kept together with staples at the hinges and which I only use for reading in bed. Why do the hinges break so easily! If the pins come out I can put a staple through and hold the hinge together that way even if the raw metal ends do occasionally catch on my hair or a scarf or something. I did come across two pairs of usable reading glasses on the way down the stairs but one was missing the ear holder and the other had mysteriously got two cracks in frame around the lens. And they were my favorite as they had rhinestones in the frames! So I ended up at CVS buying some dark pink ugly things so I could at least read what the number on each dollar bill is! My best organizing tactic is to put any glasses I find in the little drawer in the dining room side table and hope they all migrate there instead of underneath pillows, at the bottom of handbags or underneath the bed. This includes the various sunglasses I have collected over the past few years and which also seem to be experiencing a bout of lost lens or busted hinges or cracked lens holders. You'd think plastic things would last longer! But Thank God for glasses (or was it Benjamin Franklin?)