Family Weekend Getaway for the First Time
To finish off a great summer with lots of first, we took our
first family road trip as our little one turned 6 months. We drove up to
Pocono Mountains region in Pennsylvania where we enjoyed local fair and stayed overnight. It was an inexpensive family mini vacation.
First stop on our kiddos first road trip, was a winery. Of course.
We went to
Mountain View Vineyard to sample some of their wines. They also have a distillery with flavored vodkas. We arrived there early, before the place even opened as we were planning to feed the baby before hand so she would be nice and full and less fussy. It worked at least for half of the visit. While waiting for the place to open and getting some food, we met a big dog that turned out to be quite friendly. And also met a rooster, which turned out to be the bad-ass of the place and we were warned, after the fact, to not let him get to close to us.
There was good wine at this winery but no phone service. We have Verizon as the provider, and we barely had any bars. This
rarely happened in many of our travel. We were trying to look up the address of the next winery and could not get to it. Since we were not too far from our home base, I didn't even think about doing the
Google Maps offline ahead of time. We did get pointed to correct way by some of the locals and were on our way.
Next stop was the (Sorrenti)
Cherry Valley Vineyard. Unfortunately, on their site and other marketing they chose to exclude Sorrenti from the name, hence why it was so hard to find.
The food there was great, we enjoyed our pizza with some sangria and bread sticks. The property is spread out and has a fountain, gazebo, and lots of sitting areas.
The wines are ok, though well made. Though the wine servers were impersonal and standoffish. Which dampened the experience quite a bit.
While in the car we had some
kids gadgets along. A very helpful one that I use even on shorter trips around the town is the mirror that you can view in your rear-view to see your kin in a back facing carseat. The one we have,
BRICA In-Sight Magical Firefly Mirror
, also has entertainment for the little one with music lights and shapes. It comes with a remote, so that I can easily turn it on from the front seat. One caveat, is that it has to be manually turned on before starting the drive, which is actual an OK feature, though would have like on/off button on the remote.
Overnight we stayed at the Holiday Inn. At check-in we were able to upgrade to
a Jacuzzi room for less than $10. The room looked great. It was huge, see picture below. Just enough room for 3 of us :)
The bathroom could have been cleaner. There were some hairs around it and some small stains left over. Overall, the place looked clean
The phone chargers came in handy. I was charging my phone throughout the trip via the
Griffin Dual USB Car Charger
in the car and my wife powered up hers with
Pebble Smartstick 2200mAh Portable Charger
and with the
Griffin USB AC Adaptor
in the room. It saved a lot of time and worry while traveling and not having to look out for the power remain percentage.
While those are great, I have updated our
mobile charger just recently. We got the
Mophie Powerstation
that has 4000mAh
The next day, our first stop was a butterfly farm. I have never been to one of these, and we were both wondering what the kiddo's reaction is going to be since she is so little. It was quite an experience. There were a whole lot of pretty free flying butterflies. She loved every moment of it. It was fun for an entire family
The following stop was the Largest County Store. That was also an experience. A whole lot of space filled with all kinds of stuff
We had one more stop afterwards at a winery. This time at
The Big Creek Vineyard, where we met one of the owners and had a nice sampling of their wines as well as a chat. We ended up getting a couple of bottles for the
road home as their wine was good and their atmosphere was pleasant.
Other gadgets that we had with us in our trusted
Lowepro Passport
bag:
Canon Rebel XSi DSLR Camera
TP-LINK Wi-Fi Range Extender
iPhone cable
iPhone
Blue
Panasonic Lumix waterproof
camera for selfies and just quick shots
None of this is sponsored, except for amazon links. All opinions are my own
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