Girls Weekend 2015, Richmond, Virginia. Tuesday, October 27

Last full day of our Richmond, Virginia Girls Weekend adventure.  Sigh.  It always comes too fast. Once again, as always with our trips, we have thoroughly enjoyed our stay here and have seen and experienced many things that this charming and historical city has to offer.  Museums, cemeteries, Segway rides, and wonderful dining and shopping experiences.  Girls weekend is the best!!  Today after our morning rituals, Kathi uses her Uber app to get us a ride to the Edgar Allan Poe museum.  This will be the second Poe museum that we have visited on Girls weekend, the first one having been in Philadelphia, a few years back.  Unlike that museum, which was located in a home that the famed poet and story writer had actually lived in, this museum is located in the oldest house in Richmond and, while it is in the neighborhood where Poe grew up and spent the majority of his childhood, it is NOT a house that he every actually lived in.  Apparently those have all been demolished.  However, they do have quite a collection of many pieces of furniture that were in the home he lived in as well as some pieces from some of the places where he worked.  They also have several original writings of his.  The man wrote incredibly small and neatly, I must say!!  We wandered around in the museum and on the grounds for a couple of hours.  The museum also includes a model of the city of Richmond as it was during Poe's life time, along with some wonderful illustrations done by a young English street artist that were intended to accompany Poe's poem, "The Raven".  The 43 watercolor and ink illustrations,  by James Carling, are not the ones normally associated with this work, but certainly do an amazing job of capturing the mood and feel of the piece.

The museum is comprised of several buildings with a beautiful little courtyard in the center that has been designed to represent The Enchanted Garden as described in Poe's poem of that name.  This garden includes a shrine and a fountain.

There are also a couple of resident black cats, Edgar and Pluto who roam about freely.  It was all quite charming, with a bit of creepy, too, in places.  After all, we ARE talking about the master and originator  of the psychological thriller and murder mystery genre of literature.

Once we did a little shopping in the great gift shop here, Kathi, once again, got on her Uber app and got us a ride to the ShortPump shopping center.  A shopping center we chose because they have a Free People store.  I had recently purchased some Free People clothing items from the Off Saks Fifth Ave store back home in Oregon that Kathi really admired and after checking out their website she decided that she wanted to take a hands on look at their stuff, which IS fabulous, in my opinion!  So we Ubered off to the mall and spent a wonderful couple of hours going through the sale rack and trying on lots of wonderful things, some of which came home with us and some that didn't make the cut.  After that workout, we both realized that we were starving and decided to get dinner at the Rock Bottom brewery that was right there in the mall.  I had a couple of the best Bloody Mary's ever, along with  two delicious chicken quesadillas, while Kathi opted for a burger and a beer.  We made a quick dash (by now it was 8:30pm and the mall closed at 9) into both the Macy's and the Nordstrom to see if they had any deals on their small selection of Free People clothing and came away empty handed but fully satiated.  We got an Uber ride back to the apartment and called it a night.