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On my birthday, I decided to set out in search of a birthday cake. I had planned to search earlier in the week, but did not, so my birthday arrived and I had no cake. (Dale had offered to bake a cake with the kids or buy one from a local restaurant. The restaurant makes cakes I love but the kids don’t love).

I appreciated his offer, but I wanted to find an actual bakery. A place you walk into that smells yummy and there are bakery cases with donuts, cakes, cookies, pies, bread and rolls. I didn’t want the bakery to be inside a gigantic supermarket, or the cake to be mass produced.

Finding a bakery is an easy task in the midwest where thousands of German, French, Dutch, and Italian immigrants settled. In the midwest,  everyone loves bakeries and keeps them in business. In Virginia, people must be worried about their health. We midwest people don’t worry too much about their health.

When I asked around for bakeries, most people couldn’t name one in the area. After much thought, one friend remembered one in Quantico town. Quantico town is a place most people would declare, “You’ll have to see it to believe it.” The town started out as a fishing village and eventually developed an old fashioned main street with barber shops and restaurants. Then the Marine Corps surrounded it. It is entirely enclosed by the base and the potomac river. It is lost in time.

The bakery is across from the train station and makes fabulous apple fritters and bread. It’s more like a little coffee shop when you walk in. You have to order ahead if you want a cake. So, no cake, but good bread.

When I left the bakery, I walked along the potomac, eating an apple fritter and enjoying the beautiful morning God had made. After weeks of much rain and gray, the sky was sparkling blue and the sun was warm. Amazingly the temperature was sixty degrees on December 3rd. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the sun reflected off the water; it was lovely.

When I walked back to the van, I called my friend Mo, since I consider her better than a GPS. She has lived in Northern Virginia forever and when I can’t find something she tells me where to look. She directed me to a bakery in Fredericksburg, a town further south.

There I found what I was looking for: Paul’s Bakery, right next to the Salvation Army. It met the criteria: yummy smell, baked goods lined up in bakery cases, a birthday cake to buy, and a line of men. You know it is a good bakery if there are men lined up buying donuts. If men are willing to go out of their way to stop and buy donuts instead of choosing the easy solution of buying one at the Wawa, the place must be good.

The baker gladly piped “Happy Birthday Mugs” on the cake, she didn’t mind me wandering around considering it all, and there were a lot of people in the back baking. The cakes were standard yellow or chocolate with white frosting. It tasted fresh and the kids loved it.

Searching for a bakery – a good way to spend a birthday.

Yesterday was Josiah’s cross country athletic conference championships. His school is part of a fairly small private school conference here in Northern Virginia. Our conference’s top male runner may run the 5k under 18 minutes, so it is not on the same level as public schools. The public school region championships are massive and some of the top runners can run the 5k under 16 minutes.

Back in August, after the first practice, the coach told me that there was a possibility that Josiah could break 20 minutes for the 5k and make “all conference” at the end of the season. I did not believe him.

Just prior to that conversation, I had watched Josiah run a 5k road race and finish at 23:30. After that conversation, Josiah ran a 23:30 at his first meet. I considered his coach overly optimistic.

The team trained really hard. There were quite a few injuries. The coach was really tough on them. The practices and meets have been relentless. Yet, all their run times continued to drop. Prior to the conference championships, Josiah’s best time was a 20:15. In order to make “all conference,” you must be one of the top 15 runners to finish.

Yesterday, I watched him do what he has done since he was two years old: Sprint to the finish. He was behind the top 15 runners prior to the last hill where he began to pick up his pace. He started passing runners, but the other runners fought back and as they approached the line, I saw Josiah start to fade. Then, as I’d seen many times before, he refused to lose out. Some mysterious gear kicked in and his pace surged to the end.

He finished 14th with a time of 19:45 and made “all conference.”