noplasticshowers

I am on one of those ridiculous early Spring travel tears. Six cities in ten days (Alexandria, Boston, Heidelberg, Munich, Geneva, London). Just to complicate things, I tacked an extra day on the front of the trip to go see a friend of a friend perform.

What a Wednesday! We headed in to the city (well Alexandria is close enough as far as I am concerned…) to see one of our best friend’s ex boyfriend play a concert at the Birchmere. Robyn Hitchcock is playing a series of dates with Joe Boyd centered around Joe’s book White Bicycles. There is a good review of the show from San Francisco here.

To prep for the show (I know, I know, OCD), I bought Joe’s book in LA and read it over a couple of days. It’s an OK book if you can stand all of the name dropping…as well as Joe’s acerbic tendencies at the end. Seems like Joe almost had a career worth writing a book about?! Or something. Anyway, our section of the crowd loved the songs that Robyn played as well as his hilarious remarks designed to get Joe off the beaten path. More Robyn please! It is always a pleasure to watch a master perform.

In order to pull off the trip after tacking on the extra Wednesday, I decided to fly out of DCA and spend the night in Alexandria. So it was back to the well shamelessly asking Her InTouch Majesty Queen Natalie and Shirley “Morgana” King to plus up a night at the Monaco with their magic wands. They came through in spades with the expert help of Kate Ellis. My favorite thing was that they also upgraded Robyn’s room since he was mentioned in an email. Awesome. The Kimpton has me wagging my tail like crazy.

The staff at the Monaco is great. Friendly with a personal greeting, caring, and efficient.

Without further ado, the suite (room 537).  Love the bed.

And the sitting room was nicely appointed as well.

You can see the note (replete with references to previous stays) leaning on a bottle of wine next to a tasty selection of fruit and cheese.

And of course the bathroom was top notch.

The Monaco retains its five showerheads rating for all of the right reasons.

Before the show, we swung by the Majestic for some world class mixology (thanks Mike) and a great dinner. Like I said before…top notch Wednesday.