in my time, i have done quite a bit of traveling here in the united states. (a trip abroad is in the works.) i have an adventurous attitude and enjoy getting lost and discovering new sights. as i create new stories in new places, check in to see how i am loving them.
okay, my loyal readers. i know you have been awaiting the dramatic conclusion to our trip in salt lake city a couple weekends ago. i very much apologize for the delay; i have been a busy bee, per the usual! if you can find it in your heart to forgive me, i gladly give you salt lake city – day 2.
saturday morning arrived, sunny and beautiful just like friday. it was our final full day in salt lake city, so to not waste any time, we put on our walking shoes, grabbed our light jackets, and strolled over to bruges waffles and frites for some breakfast. bruges had been recommended by both my coworker drew and the concierge geoff, and considering their suggestions are almost always a hit, we knew we’d be in for a treat.
i was extra excited for this restaurant because when i think of waffles in the morning, i cannot help but play that scene from shrek in my mind. gotta love donkey!
we woke friday morning to a sliver of sunlight sneaking in through the curtains. we were in luck with beautiful weather that weekend, a great thing considering there was snow back home in atlanta. sorry, folks!
we freshened up in the suite and rode the elevator down to the lobby. we had some ideas of where to go and what to do, but we swung by the front desk for a little direction. we ended up chatting with geoff for about twenty minutes as he gave us the inside scoop of salt lake. he even helped us out with a local city map!
after taking up plenty of his time, geoff wished us well as we started out into the morning, heading east on 600 south and then hanging a left onto main. our destination was apple spice cafe and bakery for some sustenance, and after pushing through the revolving doors and riding the escalator to the second floor, there we were. the restaurant was completely empty, but seeing as how it’s located in the wells fargo business building, i guess that makes sense that time of day.
we were warmly greeted by the cashier as we browsed the menu. but, shoot! we had just missed breakfast by about ten minutes. whoops! i guess we’ll be eating an early lunch then! we stared down the menu a few minutes more, for we’d both been looking forward to a hot plate of eggs and a mug of coffee. oh well. part of being spontaneous is about being flexible, so we just rolled with it.
kyle had the soup and sandwich pairing. the tomato basil soup was fresh and perfectly warmed when it was served. he gladly dipped into it the half ham sandwich, a pretzel roll topped with cured ham, havarti cheese, greenleaf lettuce, and their signature sauce. it was a solid meal, not too filling but not too light.
tomato basil soup.
ham & harvarti sandwich.
i also went with a combination meal because it’s not often a half sandwich/half salad plate steers me wrong. per the cashier’s recommendation, i tried the pomegranate salad. at first it sounded a little too summery, but seeing as how it was nearly 50 degrees and gorgeous outside, it actually seemed quite appropriate. the half size serving was very generous and very flavorful. the poppyseed dressing was light and slightly tangy, complementing the pomegranate seeds, roasted turkey, and candied pecans nicely. i scarfed it down quickly.
pomegranate salad.
next up was the blt santa fe. i love blt’s, and with sprouts, avocado, and bbq ranch, it looked like it could be a winner. unfortunately, it didn’t wow me like i thought it would. i liked each ingredient on there, but altogether it wasn’t my favorite.
blt santa fe.
as we munched away our meals, we basked in the bright blue skies and welcoming temperature. the sun warmed by back as we dined on their patio, a pleasant start to what would be a truly great day.
okay, everyone. if you know me at all, you know it’s hard for me to stay put in one place for too long, and 2015 is proving to be no exception to that trend. last weekend was greensboro and this weekend i’m taking it cross-country with my big brother kyle to explore sale lake city, utah. the entire trip actually was prompted by a band who is touring here on concert (more on that later – i don’t want to spoil it!), and i somehow managed to rope a few folks into joining me. billy and hope are meeting us tomorrow, but kyle and i got a head start on the fun by flying out here late tonight. we’ve literally just arrived, and i’m typing to you from the hotel business center!
kyle had been in new jersey for work the past couple weeks, and with me traveling as well, i hadn’t seen him in what felt like forever. there was plenty of catching up to do, as you can imagine, so we listened and laughed while scarfing down gyro wraps and chick-fil-a waffle fries.
our delta b767-300 took off promptly at 8:42 p.m. est, taking us up into the night sky. it was about a three and a half hour flight, just enough time for our plane to disappear into the light of the full moon. i kid, i kid! it was a smooth and uneventful ride, things i like every flight to be.
about an hour in, somewhere over mississippi probably, the drink and snack cart rolled our way. the week hadn’t really been stressful for either of us, but an adult beverage sounded like a relaxing idea. kyle went with his standard tennessee honey whiskey with coke while i was more in the mood for wine.
things of varying heights!
they were only serving a single red and a single white, so my choice was pretty simple. “red, please,” i asked of the flight attendant. she handed me the bottle and i nearly chuckled out loud. do you see what i see? it’s simply a red wine, ha! what silly things life brings us. i’m no sommelier by any stretch, so we’ll say this one was a custom blend brought to me exclusively by wente.
real winners drink red wine.
now, no in-flight experience is complete without a tasty snack alongside your drink. by the looks of it, kyle and i seemed to be stockpiling for a much longer trip; she wouldn’t stop giving us those little bags! i mean, i’m definitely not complaining. it’s never a bad thing to have extra pouches of lightly salted peanuts lying around, am i right?
i spent the last couple hours of our journey building my own playlist and drifting in and out as i got lost in the music. it wasn’t too long before we touched down with a smooth landing, so we grabbed our luggage and then a cab that took us speeding towards the city. i could just make out the snowy mountainsides in the glow of the moonbeams, and i can hardly wait to see them in the morning from our penthouse haven. until then, sleep tight and goodnight!
well, my final day in greensboro arrived early sunday morning. i thought all the crazy fun had already passed, but what little did i know! we had planned to go out for brunch, but seeing as how there was freezing rain steadily building up all around the house and our cars, we went nowhere fast. good thing mary had stocked up on bread and eggs, because a homemade breakfast is just what the doctor ordered.
first things first on a lazy and relaxing sunday? mimosas! well, i take that back. we didn’t have any orange juice, so we made ourselves some berry bellinis. step one was to make a little berry puree to complement the champagne. mary whipped out her blender and got a little raspberry-strawberry concoction going. it’s silly how simple it was!
step two is to over pour the champagne so that it goes all over the cutting board and chopping block, wasting about a fourth of the bottle. whatever! we never said we were perfect, just a few friends trying to have a good time, and that isn’t too hard with champs and sweets.
i think at about eleven o’clock we finally started cooking actual food. first up, sausages! mary had a moment of inspiration and let me in on her sausage-cooking secret: use a panini skillet of some kind, the ones with the ridges. you can place those little sausage links right in between so they don’t roll all over the place. your links will be perfectly browned and juicy, a great side to any breakfast dish.
wait, though. what was our breakfast dish of choice that sunday? eggs benedict! this mary lady just does it all – homemade strawberry puree, eggs benedict. man, was i spoiled this weekend or what? mary got out her pioneer woman cookbook and turned to page 16 to find the eggs benedict recipe. this particular recipe, to quote mary, is not particularly “figure friendly.” i mean, there are two sticks of butter in the sauce alone. good thing i’m not on a diet! before we get there, though, let’s take a look at the adventure that was poaching the eggs.
i’m sure there’s some exact science to poaching an egg, but we kind of just went on memory and instinct for ours. after the water came to a slight bubble, mike used a wooden spoon to get some good circulation going. mary plopped that first egg into the water and, oh! look at that! that’s not what a poached egg should look like! it looked like some weird mess caught up in an f5 tornado!
sooooooo, with that disaster, we dumped the water and started from scratch. this time we brought the water to a very low boil, didn’t stir as quickly, and gently slipped the egg right into the water without causing too much of a commotion. the white of the egg delicately fell in on itself, creating a little envelope for that yolk to cook perfectly. ah, quite the success!
mary served them up on soft toast with generous spoonfuls of the hollandaise. the sweetest breakfast ever served! the egg was rich and helped cut out the overly sour lemon in the sauce. now, the hollandaise calls for the juice of two lemons, but the lemons we were using were a bit larger, so i think we probably didn’t account for that. i also thought the sauce was a touch too runny, but that’s just my opinion. regardless, i sopped up all the yolk and sauce with my toast and didn’t leave a morsel on the plate. a great adventure with a great result!
just when we thought all the handiwork was done for the weekend, another surprise came our way. we couldn’t get a truck to tow the mazda to the dealership for its bum tire, so mike, the hero that he is, put the spare on my little hatchback. you never know what life will throw at you, but when you’re given lemons, you’ve got to make lemonade! never stop learning, folks. never stop learning. 🙂
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we pretty much spent the entire day in the kitchen, drinking and eating our way through the afternoon. we had a hoot of a time reliving the weekend’s already wild happenings as the radio played. all of a sudden, “king of wishful thinking” by go west came on and mary squealed, nearly scaring mike and i off our chairs. “i love this song! i just cannot control my body when i hear it!” after listening and dancing to it, we pulled up the video online. i think we love it now even more, but i’ll let you be the judge!
aaahhh, the early evening was suddenly upon us, so mary and i switched to wine for the rest of the night. she’s a white wine lover and i’ve come to love red. good thing she had plenty bottles of both!
more vino!
even though we’d had a late brunch, our stomachs were starting to growl. well, just what would we have for dinner? mary had started a pork tenderloin in the slow cooker that morning, so after some serious thinking, we decided pulled pork sandwiches, mac’n’cheese, and brussel sprouts would be a great idea. am i, right? yep!
since the pork was already cooking, the brussel sprouts were up next. i’m warning you now. i took many unnecessary photos of pretty much the same thing over and over again. i mean, i had enjoyed almost that whole bottle of red by myself at that point. give a girl a break! 😉
mary had some red onion she needed to use up, so we figured we’d throw ’em in with the sprouts. mary armed herself with her onion glasses, looking like a regular pro. just check out those perfectly chopped chunks!
next we got the pan sizzling and browned the bacon (because bacon makes everything better) and softened the onions. the kitchen started to smell divine, as i am sure you can imagine.
mary gave the brussel sprouts a rough chop and tossed ’em in with the bacon and onions. it’s such a shame brussel sprouts get such a bad rap. they just needed to be served with fatty bacon all this time!
here is what brussel sprouts look like after you add salt…
…and here is how they look when you throw in some pepper…
…and then after you add garlic powder…
…and then when they’re all ready!
we finally had everything ready, so we dug in and spent the rest of the night watching old home videos that mary’s dad mark had filmed at the 1996 olympics in atlanta. ah, we were so young!
om nom nom.
eventually we rinsed our plates, filled the dishwasher, and headed to our beds. i cannot express enough thanks to mary and mike for a fantastic weekend, and my heart swells just thinking about how much i love these dear friends of mine. without any plans written down, we let the days take us where they would, which was, as i had hoped it would be, a lot of fun.
it was a sleeping in kind of morning on saturday, so there really was no rush to get going. i think we rolled out of bed and downstairs around nine or so, still rockin’ the pj’s in true weekend spirit. the coffee pot was fresh and full, so i fixed myself a mug as the sun poured in through the windows. mary finished prepping the strada and popped it in the oven for some good breakfast eatin’. just as the oven door shut, her hubby mike walked in from the garage, home depot bag in hand. ah, yes! the adventure of the garbage disposal continues, just as i promised!
we gathered in the living room around the fireplace, enjoying our savory breakfast before the manual labor began. i’ve got the strada recipe over here for you, so if you need a new something to add to your book, enjoy! it was rich and filling and reminded me a bit of biscuits and gravy, which we know should be a staple in every southern girl’s repertoire.
this weekend i am spending some much needed time in greensboro with one of my favorite couples mary and mike. mary has known me all my life; we lived in the same neighborhood when i was born all those years ago in birmingham. our mothers tori and kathleen were besties, as were our dads mark and milo. they were friendships that were meant to be in that sweet neighborhood of broken bow south, but more importantly, they are friendships that continue to stand the test of time, as they have moved anywhere and everywhere over the past 20 or so years. as young adults, all of us kids love each others’ company. i consider them some of my closest friends, and to visit mary and mike at their humble abode in north carolina is a very special treat!
i rolled in late thursday night to a winter wonderland in their darling subdivision. it’s so pretty!
the picture below is from us all at kyle and kari’s wedding back in october. such a good looking bunch! i’ll point everyone out, starting with kathleen on the far left and working clockwise.
so, they both went into work that friday morning while i posted myself up at their kitchen table with my laptop, cranking out some sweet documentation for work. before i hopped to it, though, i laced up my running shoes and braved the cold winter air for a quick jog. when i say quick, i mean that the roads were still icy and i almost twisted my ankle and fell flat on my back, so i very quickly ran down to the edge of the cul de sac and right back into the garage. oh well!
snow running: as unproductive as it sounds.
the afternooon came and went, and then the happy couple arrived home, ready to begin a weekend of fun and plenty of laughs. we were going to keep things chill this friday night, so we started by cracking open some beers and bottles of wine. it amazes me how quickly you can fall right back into conversation and comfort even when you haven’t seen someone in months. in between handfuls of cheez-its and hummus we reminisced about our families and caught up on the latest and greatest in the neuwirth, guthrie, and andrich lives.
after appetizers we dug into our wedge salads, something remotely healthy, for the rest of the weekend we were quite bad with our diets. okay, so maybe i’m not actually on a diet, but i needed something green with this meal, so iceberg lettuce and cucumbers sounded like a fair idea. oh, yeah, but then we covered them in bacon bits and ranch dressing. whoopsies!
mary whipped up some shake’n’bake chicken and nancy fuller potatoes for our dinner. the chicken was delicious, but i will admit that the potatoes were somewhat average. don’t get me wrong, i love carbohydrates and butter and cheese all in the same dish just as much as the next foodie, but i wasn’t dazzled. regardless, we cleaned our plates and got to cleaning the kitchen and then…..oh……and then the garbage disposal broke down on us. oh, the horror!
mike opened those cabinet doors to find water dripping from the disposal all over the place. well, that’s an easy way to spice up an otherwise already lovely friday night, yes? there wasn’t much we could do about it at the time, so mike quarantined off the kitchen sink so that the damage wouldn’t get worse. excellent work, mike! stay tuned for saturday’s greensboro post to find out what happens in the garbage disposal chronicles. i promise it will be worth the read!
we topped off our glasses and snuggled onto the sofas to watch gone girl. mary and i had read the book and were dying to see the movie. mike didn’t have a clue about the film but was a trooper to watch with us anyway. it’s more of a thriller than anything, so it was a good choice for the three of us. two and a half hours later the credits rolled and although i liked getting to see the story on the silver screen, i concluded i liked the book much more. i know that’s typical with most movie adaptations (just ask me my opinion on unbroken), but even knowing that, i’d say it was definitely worth the rental. maybe not the eleven bucks it would have cost to have seen it in the theatre, but definitely the few redbox bucks we spent.
we turned off the gas logs, folded the blankets, and trudged upstairs to bed. i ended the evening with an endearing conversation with phillip and then called it a night. if you thought friday was entertaining, just you wait!
at last! our final day of fun in dc ushered itself in on sunday morning. our flight wasn’t until the early evening, so we had plenty of time together before everything came to a close.
after getting our packing done, we headed out the door for brunch, but wait! not before i can coordinate these adorable photos on the stoop of our chinatown home! aah, i looked at them and could hardly contain myself. what a great trip because of these gems!
saturday morning came a little earlier than i would have liked, but there’s no time to lose when you’re on vacation in dc, so i rallied (can you rally at ten a.m.?) and we set out to take on the day.
we stopped at panera bread for some quick sustenance and then hopped on the blue line in chinatown to head to arlington. we plan our annual trip around the wreaths across america ceremony, and with this year being the 150th anniversary, i wasn’t going to miss it for anything.
we woke to a beautiful friday morning in chinatown, mildly rested and ready to take on the day. there was food to be eaten and things to be seen, and we weren’t going to miss any of it! we set off on foot through our neighborhood to begin our adventures.
okay, i’m a touch behind on my writing, but better late than never, right? right! i’m glad we agree. so, without further adieu, i give you the first day of last week’s fifth annual dc december trip!
we flew out of atlanta around eight p.m. thursday night to arrive in our very chilly capital city at a decent hour. the trip was quick and uneventful, just how i like my cross-country treks. well, this trek was not technically cross-country, but we certainly were no longer in the south. we freshened up and joyously retrieved our suitcases from baggage claim. i say “joyously” because one year my bag was very much left in atlanta all on its lonesome. poor little guy! delta quickly delivered him to our door the next day, though, so all was well.
jamie & me.
nathan & alison.
jamie & greg.
a $25 cab ride later, we were at the doorsteps of our humble abode for the weekend in chinatown. nathan had found a sweet townhome for our visit on vrbo, and with six bedrooms and three bathrooms, it was perfect for our large group.
we dragged our things up the stairs, in through the doors, and pleasantly found peter and shaun inside, greeting us with drinks and food. it was actually sarah’s birthday that day, so they surprised her with a dinosaur cake; how thoughtful! he was affectionately named barnabas and kept us company most of the time we were in town. the yellow cake was thickly topped with frosting so sweet that i almost had a stomachache afterwards. but! it was nothing a little adult beverage couldn’t remedy.
sarah, pleasantly surprised and so kind as we sang “happy birthday.”
what did i say when i saw this cake? “good thing there’s grass, because otherwise he’d be walking on clouds, and that’s just not realistic.”
we enjoyed the rest of the night as we sipped on manhattans with one another. the fun was only beginning!
kelsey v 