Road Trips, Chobani, and 3 Years of Meet Virginia.

Guess who has driven to Raleigh for the past 5 weekends in a row?  This girl.  I thought life might become a little bit less nomadic when I moved to Charlotte, but nope, my travels continue.  I’d like to think I’ll be done packing and unpacking somewhere in the near future, but more and more out-of-town friends keep getting engaged and having babies so it looks like I’ll be logging plenty of miles in 2013.

(Clearly he thinks I’m nuts.)

I was happy to have a friend with me for the 3 hour drive on Saturday!  I love taking road trips with Jonathan – he’s the perfect companion for long drives.  What makes a perfect road trip companion?  Here are my requirements:

• Must sing along the radio with me
• Must be willing to make multiple stops to accommodate my small bladder
• Must like to play road trip games (spot state license plates, find all of the ABC’s on billboards, list foods for every letter of the alphabet, etc…)
• Must make pit stops for road trip snacks

Jonathan does all of the above, making him my favorite road trip buddy. (Kara and Sally, if you’re reading, y’all are great car companions too!) Anyway, we headed to Durham on Saturday to celebrate Jonathan’s sister’s birthday.  When we left town it was snowing, but we quickly drove out of it.  Bummer, we’ve seen hardly any snow this winter!

The night before I got home to a big box on my front door from Chobani!  They sent me two of their new flavors to review, banana and pear, so I brought them along for a road trip snack.

I had the pear and Jonathan had the banana.  We gave both flavors a thumbs up!  I loved the real chunks of pear in mine.  My only drawback is that both flavors are pretty much sugar bombs – the pear flavor has 19 grams.  Let’s be serious though, I’m still gonna eat it – I eat greek yogurt almost every day for a snack.

The rest of the weekend was fun and somewhat uneventful.  We celebrated Jonathan’s sister’s, cousin’s, and grandmother’s birthdays, rented Moneyball (aka I fell asleep), and finally hung curtains in my apartment.

Unrelated: Today is Meet Virginia’s third birthday!  Three years ago today, I was a Junior in college, putting off studying for a Cognitive Psychology exam, when I decided to start writing in my own little corner of the internet.  I never imagined that people would actually read my writing, but for whatever reason, they did.  My blog has afforded me lots of opportunities, has allowed me to create lots of new friendships, and has grown into something I’m really proud of over the past three years.  I’ve been able to challenge myself as a writer by sharing my thoughts here frequently and I’m so glad I have all of the highs and lows of the past three years chronicled here.

For fun, here are the Top 10 posts from the past 3 years:

1. Cookie Dough Peanut Butter Cups - Make these!
2. DIY Magnet Board Tutorial - Thank you Pinterest for driving lots of traffic to this one.
3. Be The Judge - One of the most common search terms that leads people here is “drawing of a lion” and it always makes me chuckle.  My lion drawing was totally the best. :)
4. What I’ll Miss Most About Raleigh - This was hard to write at the time, but everybody who read it was so wonderful and supportive.  The blogging community is awesome.
5.  A Bit Of Housekeeping - That weirdo time some stranger was posing as me on Facebook.
6. Which Wich Do You Want - This post got a lot of page views after Skinny Runner linked to it many moons ago.
7. Father’s Day Card Tutorial - Again, thanks Pinterest.
8. DIY Antique Blue Jars Tutorial - Pinterest FTW.
9. So, How Did You Two Meet? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 - The story of how Jonathan and I met.
10. Breaking Up Is Hard To Do - How to know when it’s time to stop reading a blog.

Obviously from clicking through those 10 links you’ll see that lots can happen and change in just a few years.  Thanks for hanging with me here for all this time and being so supportive and encouraging through all of the ups and downs!  I plan to continue writing here with regularity, so I hope you’ll all stick around. :)