Go ahead, search the tag #vanlife. Think Gabby Petito, or any one of thousands of men and women, young to old, touring the parks, seeing the sights, living in their van. Think bloggers, YouTubers and Instagramers telling their story, influencing wishful thinkers and wannabes, selling a nomadic lifestyle and maybe a t-shirt. Think of me doing the same thing, living at a shopping mall, blogging #MallLife.

Susan and I scoped out RIO a few days ago—a 760,000 square foot “lifestyle center” in Gaithersburg, Maryland. They built it in 1997. I’ve driven past it countless times. For the first eight years, I passed it as I made the forty-five-minute trip north from Washington DC for a night out in Fredrick, Maryland. And since 2005, I passed it as I drove the two-hour trip south from Gettysburg to go visit, shop or sightsee in DC.

RIO abuts Interstate 270, a twelve-lane superhighway that adjoins the Washington Beltway with the wealthy suburbs in Montgomery County Maryland. In all those trips, certainly more than two hundred, I never gave RIO much more than a glance. Other than a driving range with a skyscraping net to keep golf balls out of the highway, the contents of RIO lifestyle center were a mystery to me.

After Susan and I dropped our daughter Sophie at Washington National airport on Tuesday to fly back to her summer job counting trees in Wisconsin, we headed back to Gettysburg. Our midmorning journey put us back on the highway at eleven-thirty, about forty minutes after I typically eat lunch. I was famished.

Despite the number of times I’ve traveled that corridor, I know almost nothing about what’s behind the concrete wall lining 270. Overgrown suburbs sure, but to actually find a restaurant, something other than fast food anyway, would be impossible. Trying to think of a cuisine we were likely to find, affordable and fast, but not burgers, proved challenging, Finally I came up with going to a diner. I envisioned eating a gyro or souvlaki.

Apple Maps suggested the Silver Diner, an overpriced restaurant chain we know from when we still lived in DC. We followed the directions off the highway and shuttled from one thoroughfare to the next, each road marginally smaller than the last, past a billion townhomes, until we pulled into RIO.

I learned that a lifestyle center is exactly the same thing as what they used to call a ‘town center’ twenty-five years ago, and exactly what I called a mall when I was a kid. Stores, restaurants, hotels and a movie theater—I guess the lifestyle part is the driving range. We puttered down a tight grid of streets, buildings up to fifty feet tall crowded the sidewalk resembling a miniature Wall Street. Parking signs with directional arrows drew us deep into the center of the complex.

And there it was, right next to the garage, the Silver Diner. GASP! And next to that, Poki DC! When we moved to Gettysburg eighteen years ago, we knew we would make sacrifices. Salaries, sure, professionals in Gettysburg make half of their big city peers; Culture, yup. In DC we walked to the zoo and rode the metro to museums; But what we really lost in Gettysburg was food.

As we prepared for our move, I told Susan I was excited to find some honest to goodness pub-grub. Burgers, Rubens, Fish and Chips, food you buy in a bar. Every restaurant in Gettysburg sold pub food. In DC, we only had Indian, Thai, Malaysian, Japanese, Ethiopian, Tex Mex, fusion this and reduction that. Sometimes a guy just wants a sandwich with fries. Besides, we said, it’s just a matter of time before a larger variety of restaurants begin springing up in Gettysburg. But no. Since 2005, we’ve added about six brew pubs and lost our only sushi restaurant. Now I crave ethnic food* like a nineteenth century sailor craved citrus fruit.

* The term ethnic food strikes me as a Eurocentric phrase that probably went out of vogue in the past twenty years. It reminds me of how we called Chinese food Oriental food when I was a kid. Of course, I don’t know about any recent changes in restaurant terminology because it never comes up. We only have what I would call American food, but what I really mean is European food. My google search verified that calling non-European food ethnic has indeed fallen out of favor, article after article told me this, but none offered a better term. I guess I’m going with food with a non-European origin (FWANEO). 

 Let me tell you about Poki DC. It’s a build your own bowl deal: Start with sushi rice, add two ‘proteins.’ I went with ahi tuna and grilled squid. Add all your accoutrements—mine: edamame, two types of seaweed and scallions. Topped with a honey wasabi sauce. Thank god we were the only people eating in Poki. “Yum!” “OMG, this is so awesome.” “Mmm-mmm.” Chomp, chomp, slurp.  Anyone sitting near us would have been quickly annoyed or disgusted and moved away. Susan opened Zillow Online Real Estate Database and immediately started pricing townhomes within walking distance.

With our youngest out of high school, we’re feeling untethered. Our life-long dream of moving to a town of our choice is on the horizon. Mostly we’ve been thinking about towns that abut vast wilderness areas where we can hike and bike and run right outside our back door. But here we were contemplating ground zero in the sprawliest suburban sprawl in the mid-Atlantic all because of a sushi bowl. I can’t believe we’d ever move into a suburban environment like that, but if we did, walking distance to RIO would work well. I’d change the name of this blog to Mall Life and spend my days reviewing the FWANEOs scattered about the mall. #MallLife baby!