My husband and I love taking short trips to get away from home. We don’t need to go far or anywhere fancy, escaping our daily routine, is the best way to recharge our batteries.
This summer, we took two small trips, first, a trip to Athens for 2 days. We ate, we rested, we explored. Two foodie highlights were dinner at The National, one of Chef Hugh Acheson’s restaurants, and Weaver D’s Delicious Fine Foods, the restaurant that inspired R.E.M.’s album title Automatic For The People.
A week later, we decided to rent a cabin near Helen. We spent two very calm days in the woods, reading, grilling and enjoying our peaceful surroundings.
I was particularly excited at the idea of grilling since it isn’t something we get to do in our city apartment. While the grill was fairly gross (poorly maintained and, from the look of it, rarely cleaned), Jeff managed to create us a clean shield and we were able to enjoy some simple, yet tasty food.
For the first night, I had done some quick shopping at Target so we had Asian-BBQ beef skewers, asparagus and corn on the cob. The beef was placed directly on our make-shift pan, the asparagus was placed in a foil boat with butter and salt, and the corn was rolled up in foil. These simple meals are often my favorites.
The second night, we wanted to somewhat recreate our usual camping meals since we are unlikely to go camping this year. So we enjoyed hot dogs, baked beans and leftover corn. At Jeff’s suggestion, we also grilled some broccoli with salt and butter. While this felt like way too much food, it was also very tasty.
To counter our rich dinners, we made sure to bring Greek yogurt for our breakfasts, and for lunch, we had hard-boiled eggs, carrot sticks and broccoli florets.
We enjoyed our time away so much that we decided to extend it for an extra night. Since our cabin was already booked, we found an inn in Helen with rooms by the river. We enjoyed lunch by the river at Café International. For dinner, we cooked up most of the leftover food we had (beef skewers, hotdogs and broccoli) and, ended the day by reading by the river. Quite a nice way to end prolong our trip!
Our adventure also involved several snacks, of course, including:
- Ruffles All-Dressed Chips
- Lucky Charms Treats (a revelation!)
- Krave Beef Jerky
- Boiled Peanuts
- Sliced oranges (not everything was bad for us!)
- Satellite Wafers (a taste of childhood!)
- Kinder Surprise (while they are generally not sold in the U.S., we stumbled upon a store that had a license to sell them!)
Now, we are back home and I feel like this trip was our reset button to start eating well and exercising. That feels great!
The Hungry Quebbie 