Road Trip!

This past week I've been a little MIA on all Social Mediums, and that's because Joe and I were making our way across the country on a Road Trip! As most of you know, Joe is moving out to Colorado for 6 months to pursue a career in professional snowboarding. It's such an amazing opportunity for him and I couldn't be more proud of excited. Even though I'm going to miss him like crazy.

The past week we drove from Virginia to New Orleans to Corpus Christi to Roswell to Littleton and finally to our destination, Silverthorne, Colorado. It was quite the adventure, we saw and experienced so much over the past week, it's hard to recap everything other than with photos. But I am going to give you some of my tips for a road trip that helped get us through.

PODCASTS | Oh my gosh, we would have never made it through without good podcasts. We started with Homecoming, then moved to Limetown, and got through season 1 and half of season 2 of The Black Tapes. All three podcasts were awesome and I highly recommend. Previously, I've listened to Serial and S Town, so if you liked those, you'll love these. It made the drive go by so quickly and kept us awake.

PACK SNACKS | We packed a nice bag of snacks for the road and lots of bottled water so we wouldn't have to stop as much. I chose trail mixes, protein bars, pretzels, and my favorite road trip snack: dill pickle flavored sunflower seeds. Sunflower seeds are great because they take time to eat, aren't a ton of calories and keep you occupied and awake.

KEEP THE GAS TANK FULL | If you're driving over any of those Midwest states, you'll have plenty of roads that go on forever and you don't see anyone or anything else out there. Some times we went hours without seeing anything, so every time we saw a gas station, we stopped and filled up.

TAKE PHOTOS & STOP FOR COOL THINGS | We stopped at a few random places we saw along the way and any scenic stops for two reasons: one, its nice to get out of the car; and two, who knows when you'll come back to that same place again? If you don't do it then, when will you?

LANDSCAPES ARE COOL | One of the coolest/craziest things Joe and I found interesting was how different each landscape was. We went from our usual Virginia to the mountains of southwest VA to just trees after trees of what looks like Virginia but is really Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. Then finally got to the swamps, bayous and cities of the dead of Louisiana, then to the plains of Texas to the dessert of New Mexico then back to beautiful snow capped mountains of Colorado. It's crazy how much it changes. See photos below!

10-12 HOURS IS A GOOD AMOUNT OF DRIVING TIME | Day 1 we were really ambitious and drove 16+ hours straight from Fredericksburg to New Orleans. It was doable, but it was really pushing it. We didn't get to NOLA until 2am. It seemed to take for-e-ver and by midnight we were going crazy. Every other travel day was between 8 and 12 hours and that seemed to be the perfect distance. Just long enough to be in the car, enough time for a few good stops, and 10-12 hours gets you to a different state typically, so you felt like you were moving.

BE GOOFY & RELAX | Don't take the trip too seriously! Have a tentative itinerary, but also be flexible to change things up in case you decide to stop somewhere extra or do something different. This was a little bit harder for my type A personality, but it was fun to just kind of go with the flow for a few days.