Since it's the last day of the year I thought it'd be a good time to reflect on the past year and post the photos from the gratitude challenge I did back in November. I've done this 30-day gratitude photo challenge past years from positivelypresent.com and I always love having this small challenge to remind me daily everything I have to be thankful for. Here is the recap from when I did it last year: 2014 Gratitude photo challenge. More like vacation at Cape Cod, MA but I like "life on the Cape" more for a blog post title! Back about a month ago already I took a week off and headed up to Cape Cod with Kyle for a much needed vacation. It is gorgeous up there and the perfect balance of activities, relaxing, ocean time, and sea food. Here are my favorite things we did on vacation: kayaking through the Nauset Marsh. Beach time at the National Seashore - especially seeing all the seals! Yoga with one of my favorite teachers who used to teach at Tranquil Space. Day at Truro Vineyards and South Hollow Spirits. Pretty safe to say this was a great vacation spot and the weather was perfect, we would definitely come back and have already talked about other things we would want to check out like whale watching and walking through the dunes. Plus I just love the ocean and will never say no to a vacation that includes the beach! Some other random things from vacation that I should definitely mention: BEST. BREAKFAST. SANDWICH. EVER. from Mike and Patty's in Boston (seriously I would go back to Boston just for this sandwich). Ran the Cape Cod Canal 10k, Kyle checked Massachusetts off his list. Used AirBnB for all lodging and worked out great for us. Ate my first lobster roll, was good but not sure worth the market cost of lobsters.
Over the 4th of July one of my good friends AC got married down in southern Virginia which was a great excuse for my and Kyle to take a long weekend exploring the area, seeing family, and catching up (and meeting) old friends. It was a pretty packed weekend but nice to be out of the DC area over the holiday. The wedding was not until later in the day so we were able to do a little exploring around Charlotesville which was fun since I had never been before. We made sure to find good coffee, food, and desserts of course! Besides the eats, we walked around and checked out UVA. Besides the wedding we were able to visit with Kyle's grandma and see the building his grandpa used to run his wood working business out of. It is now a winery tasting room but still has some of the original architecture and signs. It was really cool to see plus the wine was awesome. We then met up with one of Kyle's best friend from high school and his friends family, it was great to finally meet them and have a great home cooked meal and just catch up!
I took off for the long Memorial Day weekend and headed to the Fingerlake region in New York. It was partly so Kyle and I could do the 8k glassfest but it was also for some much needed R&R, wine drinking, and just fresh air. Brittany and Dustin also drove up for the weekend so it was a cute little couple's weekend! The drive was 5-6 hours but included a Sonic pit stop and wasn't bad, and there was NO awful holiday traffic so that was good. We stayed at a B&B in Watkins Glen with our race being 25 minutes away in Corning. Watkins Glen is at the southern point of Seneca lake so we had awesome access to a ton of wineries around the lake. It was a beautiful area. I have to say the town was not anything too amazing, but was a good place to recharge and just have a quite and simple weekend. We found a couple yummy restaurants, my fave being Nickel's Pitt BBQ mmmm. We went to quite a few different wineries and I found some pretty good ones, but it was crazy how cheap the tastings and wines were up there. Tasting's were anywhere from $2-5 and some refunded all of that if you bought a bottle. They had a large variety of wines at alomst every stop and they pretty much said "pick 6" for the set price, which was good some of the time. However I really like a "guided tasting" where they really go over the wines so I can learn more about them. But I will definitely go back, I mean wine is wine! Along with lots of food and drinking we did check out the Watkins Glen State Park which had a lot of pretty water falls and we ran our race. The race was an 8k (about 5 miles) and went really well with Kyle being super speedy finishing in under 35 minutes, and I finished at around 50 minutes. My goal was to finish by running the whole thing so I was really happy, even with the temps starting in the 30s when we got to the race, but was probably 40s when we ran.
May was a super fun month with a lot of celebrations all around including Kyle, my mom, and my dad's birthday along with mother's day! I wasn't able to celebrate in person with the parents but I was still able to wish them well and I will just have to celebrate extra hard the next time I see them. Kyle and I had a fun weekend in Pittsburgh celebrating (which of course included the now yearly tradition of banana pudding!) We also checked out Wigle's whiskey garden & barrelhouse for some drinks and music. I found a super could chalkboard map made for tracking what states Kyle has completed a race in. It also has hooks for medals and clips for his bibs. I think it turned out super cool and it's fun seeing Kyle excited to fill in the states! I found it on Etsy from the York Sign Shop if anyone is interested, they have a lot of cool products and the quality is awesome.
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