Exciting today
With this view, you can’t go wrong! Shall we begin with TEA? Virginia Beach, September 2013
“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.” ― A.A. Milne
I love, love, love breakfast, even though I seldom eat it except on Saturdays. But sometimes I eat breakfast for dinner, at Cracker Barrel or IHOP or Denny’s or even at home. I’ve also learned to indulge in breakfast when Jeff or Matt is in the hospital, and the rising comes early (with medical rounds seemingly at sun up and uncomfortable chair-beds that make it impossible to sleep well anyway). Hospital cafeterias do breakfast well, or at least cheaply, and in the hospital, I know that may be the only real meal I get that day.
But my hands-down favorite place for breakfast is the tiny but very popular Belvedere Coffee Shop in Virginia Beach, a place Jeff discovered a few years ago on Trip Advisor, when he wanted to plan a fun weekend for us. If you go there, be sure to ask for the “honeymoon table” in the corner, with a single seat for two, facing outwards. No matter what you order for breakfast, it will go PERFECTLY with the view you will enjoy there.
Are you a breakfast person? What are your favorites? You have my permission to indulge, today or sometime soon!
This post was first published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.
- Posted in: Uncategorized
- Tagged: beach, Belvedere, breakfast, café, coffee, fun, gorgeous views, meals, mornings, tea, vacations, Virginia Beach
Defeat Despair 
Julia, when McDonald’s started all-day breakfast several years ago, I was the first one to order it for lunch at the Hayfield McDonald’s 🙂 . The manager took my picture because they were asked to send some to the corporate HQ or somewhere!
I LOVE Cracker Barrel. And yes, I do order breakfast for lunch or even dinner when in a place that offers it.
And I especially love Winnie the Pooh! But I had missed that quote. What a nice combination of “a few of my favorite things” 🙂 .
Susan, I hope that’s a real Pooh quote and not a false attribution. Just like Abraham Lincoln and Yogi Berra, Pooh gets misquoted quite often. As Yogi Berra famous stated, “I never said a lot of the things I said.” 😀 BTW breakfast is the only thing I like to eat at McDonald’s. If they ever go to serving it all day, I might visit more often.
Hi Julia,
I looked up The Belvedere Coffee Shop…sadly, it was demolished in January of this year. That didn’t surprise me after I read that the owners had sold the property in 2015 to a hotel chain for $7 million! I guess that worked out well for them considering the 2020 pandemic…and perhaps not so well for the hotel chain.
I remember reading The Outsiders with my sixth graders many years ago. One thing that stuck out for me was a line in the book, “Nothing gold can stay.” I knew it came from a poem, but only now, by searching, did I realize that the line is from a poem by one of my favorite poets, Robert Frost. (I chuckle at myself as I write ‘one of my favorite poets’ because until recently I was a ‘poem averse’ person…and I’m still iffy on some poetry. But Robert Frost I like!)
As I grow older, more and more people who were pillars in my life (my parents, grandmother, etc.) have passed on from this life, and the ‘nothing gold can stay’ idea really hits home. The impermanence of all we hold dear…human and otherwise…helps me to remember to appreciate and to be grateful for each day. On my best days I look for the ‘gold’ in the day.
God bless you, Julia. Have a golden day! Pat XOXO
Pat, I had seen that story about the Belvedere and I felt a twinge of sadness, but realized I would probably never go back there again without Jeff anyway. I suppose it was only a matter of time before that VERY retro (shabby) hotel in that super prime real estate spot would be deemed unworthy of the space. It will be interesting to see what goes up in its place, and when it will open.
Yes, I too was surprised to find out that line was from Robert Frost, who is also one of my favorite poets, if not my very favorite. I’m currently taking an online poetry workshop at Oxford University in England; now that COVID has forced them online, it’s my big chance to see if my dream of enrolling in their low-residency Master’s program in creative writing is something I really want to do, without actually making a trip over there. So far the verdict is a guarded “yes.” I have been impressed with the quality of the program and the skill/knowledge level of both the teacher (or in Oxford lingo, the Tutor) and my classmates. It’s quite challenging but I totally enjoy it. If I do end up enrolling in their program it will mean going to England four times a year, which for me sounds like a great excuse to go! I’m taking this course for credit so I’ll see whether the Tutor’s feedback sounds more like “you might be able to make a go of it” or “ARE YOU CRAZY? Don’t quit your day job!” 😀 At Oxford we are in the midst of Michaelmas Term (which they pronounce Micklemas) which even the name sounds festive and British to me. In our cohort of 18, there are a couple of other American students in my class, one from Germany, and one who lives in Valencia, Spain, having immigrated from Switzerland because she prefers warm weather to cold. In my mind I’m thinking “how could anyone WANT to leave Switzerland?” 😀
Perhaps you are put off of poetry because the trend is so much toward “free verse” and so much of it is undisciplined, needlessly obscure or esoteric, or just outright bad. Our tutor is quite kind and open-minded but he has made it clear he prefers (and writes/publishes) traditional verse, which usually scans and includes some rhyming, so he is gently nudging the mostly free-verse-inclined class in the direction of scansion and maybe some rhymes here and there. He also unapologetically refers repeatedly to the King James Bible, and has incorporated portions of it into his online lectures, which for me is quite refreshing. As for writing poems, in which we have weekly assignments that we critique for each other before class, rhymed and metric verse is about all I write. Even my unrhymed poetry is usually in iambic pentameter, or common verse, or other similar structures. Our Tutor (though mostly staying with British poetry) does seem to admire Frost a lot, which is not surprising since Frost was such a master of traditional forms.
On a more somber note…triple yes on the idea that “nothing gold can stay” and we learn this more and more– a form of wisdom not without pain, but which does ultimately make the days richer. As it happens, I just yesterday FINALLY wrote back to you, and it will go out in today’s mail. I probably wrote less in that note than I wrote here, but hopefully none of it is duplication. God bless you too my friend. Your steadfast faith and encouragement mean the world to me. ❤
Good morning, Julia! I usually prefer other meals over breakfast, but yesterday I was thinking fondly about going out to breakfast. This year, this blog post is similar to tomorrow’s post, where ordinary things have become “exceptional.” Several times, lately, I’ve been grateful for memories of activities that are no longer available… Orchestra, breakfast places (take out does not work for breakfast ambience), public skating at the NESS. I’m going to have some stories to tell, one day, I suppose.
Yes, you will! (have stories to tell). And hopefully we all appreciate many things we once hardly thought about. Like breathing without a mask. Hey, how did you know what “tomorrow’s” post was going to be? Looking at the date, I guess you were addressing this comment to yesterday’s post and writing in the moment, as it were.
Ha!
Lately I’ve been swimming first thing in the morning and sometimes don’t have time to read…. So when I catch up, I end up reading your posts in reverse order!
You might have noticed that my comments are fewer and less wordy lately, too. It’s those early mornings.
Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays I may have a little more time.
I sent you an actual (brief) email in the past couple of days.
I wish you a wonderful Sunday (which it is today).
Susan, thank you. I will hunt up your email. I seriously need to do better at staying caught up with my inbox. For decades it was a reliable way to reach me, but in recent years that has changed. I’m pretty aggressive about unsubscribing to all the junk but somehow it keeps arriving, and worse, as business increasing moves to digital, more and more “urgent” emails come in (bills, statements, etc.), forcing everything else on the back burner. Now, it seems, there is NO 100% reliable way to reach me! 😀 I feel pulled in various directions as different people have different means of preferred communication. To name just a few: texts, emails, Facebook messaging (which I only check sporadically), phone messages (many of which end up on Google voice and I forget to check), and good old fashioned postal mail– which, it turns out, is easier to remember if one leaves it out in the line of sight, which can be an advantage AND a disadvantage. I wonder, as I turn 64 this month, whether people my age were designed to have this much to keep up with? Swimming first thing in the morning sounds like a great idea. Fred Rogers did that for most of his life. I wish I liked swimming more.
Julia, I wish I liked swimming more, too!
I’m fortunate in that the pool I use is kept at a temperature that most “swimmers” would consider almost balmy.
Yes, a too-warm swimming pool is worse than one with really cold temps. I hate getting into a pool that feels like a lukewarm bath.