Estate + ferry: shortcut out of DC

I was riding in a car driven by a woman I knew well, who was maybe my mother's age. We were on our way out of the city, which identified with DC in my mind, though a bit different.

There was a huge river running through the middle of the city, for one thing. But I'll get to that. We had figured out that the best route to take was to drive south and enter an impressive, yet compact, estate. We drove our car from the back gate, into a courtyard filled with gardens, green copper statues on stone pedestals, and a circular center with maybe a sundial or fountain in the middle.

We stopped for a moment in the circle, and I turned and took a picture out the window of some small copper statues, perhaps cherubs or children. I looked at the picture on my camera's screen, and for some reason, the focus was messed up. There were three statues, the closest one on the right, the other two behind it and slightly to the left. I had tried to focus on the middle one, but the focus ended up showing up intermittently in different parts of the picture.

We turned right from the circle and continued through a small tunnel towards the front exit from the estate. As we were coming out, some of the estate's actual residents (at least one dark-haired guy) were walking up the covered front steps (kind of like a valet area), and looked at us, as if trying to remember if we were guests staying there or what. We glanced awkwardly at them and continued out.

Basically the only thing accessible from the front exit of the estate was a ferry that crossed the very wide river that ran through the city (though here the shores of the river looked pretty mountainous/woodsy and not built up at all).

Pizza place computer care

At a carry-out pizza place (for some reason), Neil and I were trying to help Greg get his computer working. We were doing something with the hard drive (either backing it up or replacing it), and I noted that since Greg was using Windows 95, the hard drive would be the M: drive in "My Computer".

We had also brought small boxes with toys in them (my intuition tells me they may have been both LEGO and Star Wars-themed). At one point, in the busy, cramped front area of this pizza place, one of the female employees handed one of the boxes to me, as if someone else had told her to give it to me, even though I already knew it was there and that I owned it.

Meanwhile, Greg's computer was no longer there. Not sure where it went.

Technical difficulties with the cookie bike

I had a high-tech red motorcycle, and I drove it from Lake Ridge to Dale City by way of Smoketown Road. Then, I was making my way back, again on Smoketown Road, somewhere on the stretch between Minnieville and Cavalier. I had to weave between a few bicyclists on the road, and then suddenly I realized that the only reason my motorcycle was still moving was because I was pedaling it. The engine had gone dead.

I stopped and tried to fiddle with the controls. I looked at my high-tech dashboard and decided to give the operating system a reboot (it looked like a compact version of Windows 7). However, when I pressed the hard button on the dashboard to shut down the OS, it went into hibernate instead, so that wasn't going to work. Then I thought maybe I was out of fuel, so I looked at the fuel gauge, but its digital readout showed that I had almost half a tank left.

Somehow, I got back closer to home (maybe Wainscott), and my mom was outside trying to help me troubleshoot. I recalled that we were using a special fuel — basically, gingerbread cookies, though we called them something else which I can't remember. My mom had some more with her, and she took a bite of one, and I could see from her expression that it tasted kind of weird. Maybe the cookies changed over time and they had lost their efficacy.