When Lucy asked me if I'd be interested in joining her and possibly other friends for a weekend in Charlottesville, I knew I could not turn down the offer. Lucy lived in Charlottesville for 7 years between college and her move to NYC. She loves this town and I'd heard her talk it up quite a bit. I knew I could trust her opinion and that it would be a fun town to see. I also knew that Lucy has exceptional taste and we would only be doing/seeing/eating the best that Charlottesville has to offer.
We left for Virginia on Friday afternoon before Memorial Day. We (Lucy, Amanda, Carlos, and I) met up at Penn Station around 4:30 to catch a train to Newark where we rented a car. We opted to rent in Newark for 2 reasons...cheaper rentals and avoiding the nightmarish traffic trying to get off the island of Manhattan on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend. Getting to Newark took some time and some money so I'm not sure it saved us much other than the stress of the traffic. The drive took us a lot longer than it should have, mostly due to traffic on the highways. We finally hit Charlottesville around 1AM, I think, and immediately hit the sack!
We stayed at Lucy's super-cute house...she still owns a home there and rents it out to friends.
Her hydrangea bush was really blooming!
We woke up on Saturday morning in time to join Lucy for brunch with some friends of hers - she still has quite a community of friends there. We went to a cafe called La Taza in an interesting neighborhood in town. Lucy informed us that you do not eat inside during the summer in Charlottesville, so we pretty much didn't all weekend.
Good eats!
Following breakfast, we headed to the downtown Charlottesville area. Lucy met a friend there for a chat over coffee and pointed Amanda, Carlos, and I in a direction to take off on our own. We started with a stroll through the Charlottesville Farmer's Market.
We couldn't resist homemade Popsicles!
Amanda and I
We got the strawberry Popsicle - it had chocolate
shavings in it. Can't go wrong there!
From the Farmer's market we strolled through
the pedestrian-only downtown mall.
There are lots of cute shops, restaurants,
outdoor seating, live music and people.
After seeing multiple people with boxes from this
bakery, we had to check it out ourselves!
Amanda and I split this chocolate cupcake. It
was SO good. The dice on top were like
sweetarts...fun addition!
Carlos enjoyed his oreo cupcake, too!
After we met back up with Lucy, we all hopped in
the car to head towards wine country. I was
pretty amazed at how extensive wine country
there is - there are TONS of wineries out there!
It was beautiful out there.
Our first stop was Blenheim Vineyard, owned by none
other than Dave Matthews (of the band, folks).
Once inside the tasting room, we snagged a table and
signed up for the 8-tasting option (for just $5!)
We had a lady pour each tasting and explain to us
what each wine was like, how it was made, etc...
They gave us a sheet to keep track of the wines we
tasted and what we liked or didn't like. If you can
blow this picture up, you'll see I wasn't super impressed
with any of the wines at this vineyard.
We thought the labels on their bottles were very cool.
Notice that if you matched up the red label to the white
label they make a full tree!
Each year, Dave creates a new label for just 1 wine.
This is one of his self-created labels.
There was an old barn out front of
Blenheim that was fun for photo-ops.
The cuteness of this next series of photos has
nothing to do with the photographer (me) and
everything to do with the model (Amanda).
From Blenheim, we drove to Kluge. I loved the
atmosphere of this Winery. We actually never saw
the vineyard here, but they had all kinds of dirt paths
through the trees that would have been fun to explore
had we had more time to spare.
The wine tasting here was very different in that we got all
the wines at once and no one explained them (we had
a sheet of paper to follow along with). These wines
were much better than the wines at Blenheim.
We loved the outdoor seating area at Kluge.
After leaving wine country, we went back to Lucy's for short naps and to freshen up a bit. We then went back to the downtown mall to grab some pizza slices for dinner. We also caught a bluegrass show that evening (Lucy loves bluegrass). I really liked the opening band best - they were just really fun to watch! The second band was supposedly much more talented instrumentally, but I found them a little boring.
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