The friend who allowed me to stay with him in northern Virginia has been obsessed with a chain restaurant/microbrewery called Hops ever since I first met him 7 years ago. There used to be one in Jackson, MS on I-55 North, but it closed sometime around 2004. There are only 4 left. Still, my friend kept a glass from the restaurant in his room throughout college and still has it today. He had thought about making a road trip to visit one in North Carolina when he graduated from college since it had been a special place for him, but he didn't do it for some reason. He lost track of where they were a while ago. One morning a couple of weeks ago I was driving to a Presbyterian church in Alexandria when I made a wrong turn and got lost. I didn't have a GPS in the car, so I pulled into a random parking lot so that I could study the map. When I looked up, I realized I was sitting in the restaurant of a Hops. I was a bit confused because my friend had been talking about how much he missed this restaurant recently, and I figured he would have realized that there was one an hour drive from his apartment in Virginia as soon as he moved up here. When I next saw him I made him play 20 questions to guess what I had found, and he started to freak out once he figured out that I had found a Hops. We decided to go to it before I went back to Scotland for graduation. A mutual friend from Mississippi joined us there. I was the only one who was heathen enough to order a beer. I always find it amazing that I'm the 'heathen' amongst my Mississippi friends who grew up Southern Baptist because I drink fermented beverages from time to time. Anyhow, I had to have one because this restaurant brews its own beer on site. I had the 'Alligator Ale,' which was good enough, I suppose. I'm not sure if I would plan a road trip to dive 7+ hours to eat at this restaurant, but it had decent beer. My favorite bit is that I found this place completely by accident because I took a wrong turn one morning.
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