This weekend I took my husband on a belated Father’s Day date to Taste of Ash Lawn Opera, which featured performances by the principal artists for this season’s opera: Susannah. The event was held at the Trump Winery, located on a thousand glorious acres, just a little past Monticello. The Trump Winery used to be the Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard until it was seized by the bank for defaulted loans. At one point it was listed at 100 million. Donald Trump bought it for a snip – a mere 6.2 million.

As we drove up to the Pavilion at the Trump Winery we quickly realized that there was something that didn’t quite fit into the picture. That something was us. We are not young by any stretch of the imagination, but as we, from the safety of our minivan, contemplated the other attendees making their way out of their Mercedes and into the Pavilion, we felt like a couple of blastulas.

As soon as the performance was over, we slunk out to admire the gorgeous setting…

Something about the situation made us feel a little silly…

Seriously silly:

We decided to explore a beautiful winding road to see where it led. We got a little panicky when we realized we were heading straight to the grand estate itself with no easy turn around in sight. We kept expecting to be chased away by a baying pack of coursing hounds, or perhaps by Eric Trump himself, huffing and puffing out the front door with his floppy swoop of hair and ascot blowing in the wind. We managed to turn our dusty, dented jalopy around and headed back down to earth and this spectacular, $100,000,000 view: