Sorry for having to disappear for a few days, but I’ve been a busy bee finishing up packing, cleaning my apartment, and starting my cross-country trip! Mister E flew out to Seattle Friday morning to help me finish packing (I plan on dedicating an entire post to packing up my apartment later on in the week), and we started our journey late Saturday night.
I took the first driving shift and drove four hours from Seattle to Eastern Washington before stopping at a rest stop at 2:30 a.m. to sleep for a few hours. Mister E woke up at 5 a.m. and took over driving straight into a cloudy sunrise.
I woke up at 6:30 in the morning, just in time to see us pass through Spokane, Washington, followed shortly by crossing the Idaho state line.
By this point, everyone settled into the long haul. Mister E in the driver seat with Kaylie as the co-pilot.
Prince, snuggled in the back, struggling to stay awake through everything.
And me, in my cozy slippers.
A little while later, Mister E and I shared a turkey, spinach, and pepper jack cheese wrap that I had made the night before along with a tangerine.
Before I knew it, we were leaving Idaho and entering mountainous Montana. Check out how much snow is still left on them!
Montana was absolutely beautiful and both Mister E and I enjoyed taking in the scenery.
After driving for a few hours, we stopped at a McDonald’s to freshen up and to grab a bite. My two food goals for this trip are: 1) Eat cheap! I’ve set a $50 daily budget for food total for both Mister E and I – this eliminates most sit down restaurants out of our budget. 2) Eat healthy! Just because I’m on the road, I really don’t want to live off of greasy fast food. Keeping those two goals in mind, I ordered McDonald’s fruit and walnut salad which consists of apple slices, grapes, walnuts, and low-fat yogurt. Since I wasn’t all that hungry, this seemed like the perfect snack to hold me over.
The verdict? I wasn’t impressed, but for a somewhat healthy snack on the go, I think that this was decent and probably one of the better options available on the road. However, I thought for what little food I got, this was overpriced. The apples and yogurt were good, but the yogurt was too sweet for my preference. The grapes were too mushy and I only ended up eating one. I was also disappointed to see that the were coated in sugar, which I found entirely unnecessary. McDonald’s, why do you insist on adding sugar into EVERYTHING, even the food you market as healthy?
After letting the animals out in a grassy area by McDonald’s, we hit the road again with me in the driver seat. Unfortunately, Mister E passed out pretty quickly leaving me to entertain myself.
Thank goodness for the pretty scenery to keep me from suffering from boredom!
I ended up finding myself mindlessly snacking over my few hours of driving. Snacks included a KIND bar, a chocolate vitatop, a fingerful of crunchy peanut butter, and a package of Dole fruit bites. Even though I wasn’t hungry, I just couldn’t stop eating!
Once Mister E woke up, we made a pit stop at a gas station where I ended up getting my favorite bag of chips.
I also ended up splitting a hot dog with Mister E that went unpictured. I’m not sure if I’ve ever eaten a gas station hot dog before and I have no idea why I was in the mood for one yesterday.
Once back on the road, we were close to getting into Wyoming when we found out our highway was closed due to flooding!! It was such a disaster! We ended up having to backtrack on some inner roads to get back to a major city. We even ran into our own mini flood along the way!
After driving for more than an hour, we finally reached the town of Miles where we decided to rest for the night. It was such a bummer having to take a long detour like that!! Being incredibly late by the time we reached Miles, there weren’t many places open, so we finally settled on Burger King where we shared some chicken nuggets and fries that went unpictured again. This was the first time that I’ve eaten fast food chicken nuggets in over a year! I was a little disappointed with myself for ordering them. I felt like I didn’t quite meet my first food goal of eating healthy on the road.
Well, that wraps up day one of the trip. Stay tuned for day number two!
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