We decided that Madcap coffee was well reviewed and may have appropriate coffee for us.

As we've said before, when we travel, we bring our own homeroasted pre-ground coffee and our Melitta cone brewer.   Most industrial coffee makes me very sick to my stomach.

We walk in, and I'm greeted with this sign:

In case you can't read it in the image, espresso and macchiato are marked 'for here only'.

Yes. This is correct.  They are not meant to be nursed.  They are meant to be drunk very soon after they're created.

I see to my right a lot of pourover cone brewers.

I sigh happily and choose one of their coffees to drink.

Not much seating, but we take a seat around the counter, near the espresso machine.  The espresso machine, it comforts me.

I sip it, black.  Jon looks at me quizzically.  I shut my eyes and savor.  Though I generally like some small amount of dairy fats as a flavor vector (since some compounds in coffee do not come fully forward without fats as a carrier) even black this coffee is exquisite.

I breathe a huge sigh, letting out the tension from the Place That Will Not be Named and offer some to Jon.

He smiles.

We both approve.

We discuss the coffee, how wonderful this place seems, and relax a bit more.

I get an espresso.

*happy smile*

Sweet, rich - still a dark Italian style while I do prefer a more carmelly espresso, but oh so perfectly done.

We do what we have done on roadtrips this year - we ask the staff where we should go next, specifying that we want to go to a place that is to beer and maybe food as they are to coffee.  We mention proteiny things and I go to use the restroom.

I come out, we're told to go to Stella's.  I don't know what a Stella's is, but the Yelp rating looks good, and we're shown a take out menu from them.

Yes! Seems promising!  We get vague directions and are planning to mill around and head that way.

During our milling around, I am glomped.

A rather intoxicated rather homeless person who is walking with two friends comes up to us and .. I can't really make out precisely what he's saying, but he's saying something about my hair and that it's really great and awesome and Jon is wonderful too, because we're both really cool!  Then he does the semi-drunken thing of putting his arms on our shoulders and hanging between us.

"I love you guys!!1.1..."

I pat his hands/arms.   He loves a lot right now, but seems to love the concept of people who don't look like everyone else.  His two friends, more sober than he, are hanging behind giving Jon and I the look of  'He's OK, just humor him'.   I'm not going to be mean to him, he's had an interesting life that led him to this point, and maybe two people being nice to him that day will be a good memory for him when he wakes up the next day.

His friends gather him and he stumbles off.

So do we. We're Stella bound.