From CA to VA: Day 1

Happy Monday everyone!

We made it!! I am now (unofficially–need to get on that…) a Virginia resident. Jeff and I have been having so much fun exploring our new home over the past few days. It took us awhile to get the new apartment set up, so we’ve been forced to tour all of the great restaurants in town like Gillie’s, Castle Kettle & Pub, and Sycamore Deli–tough life, I know. I can’t wait to share them with you over the next few weeks! We even arrived just in time for the annual Steppin’ Out Festival, a 2 day event featuring over 200 booths with artists, crafts, food, and more. And we got caught in our first Southern rain storm–I guess we’d better get used to it!

But before we get back into the usual swing of recipes + restaurants + all that local fun, I want to share what we’ve been doing for the past week or so–the big road trip! Sound good?

Let’s start with some numbers:

7 days

12 states

6 brew pubs

2, 669 miles

1 car

2 people

1 cat

It was definitely the way to kick off a new chapter in our lives!

Let’s break it down: Day 1 was our longest as we left Rocklin for Park City, Utah. 658 miles, 10.5 hours, 3 states–phew!

Northern Nevada was absolutely gorgeous, but one of the best parts of the day was seeing the Utah Booneville Salt Flats, although no race cars or record breaking was going on that day that we could see!

From there, we drove through Salt Lake City up towards gorgeous Park City, a fancy resort ski town revitalized by the 2002 Utah winter olympic games.

The downtown area was very Disney-esque with perfectly planned streets, businesses, restaurants, and decor.

After walking around for a bit (gotta stretch those legs after 10.5 hours!), we headed up the street toward the Wasatch Brew Pub--my parents thought we should call our road trip “The Brewery Tour” because of how many brew pubs we ended up going to–what can I say, we know what we like!

The Brew Pub was a much needed reward after such a long day on the road, but the alcohol laws in Utah are a little funny–you can only get the higher alcohol beers in bottles and they stop serving beer at 10! We had to order the Polygamy Porter’s with a slogan like this– Why Have Just One?

The food wasn’t the best brew pub food I’d ever had, but it was still pretty darn good. Although I probably shouldn’t have tried ordering Mexican food in the middle of Utah–Jeff got it right with his buffalo burger!