Travel Archives | Strength and Sunshine

3 Days Of Pink Chicken And Steamed Vegetables

July 3, 2014 by Rebecca @ Strength and Sunshine 42 Comments

Well I survived…I think. But I am coming back with even less confidence than before. You will see why once I take you through the endless-no-sleep days that were Sunday-Tuesday. Sunday started with a wake-up at 3:30am and hopping in the car to leave at 5:30am. The only thing that made this morning drive okay was the fact that I had made pancakes the night before to eat in the car! Haha, can’t go without my weekend morning pancakes. It was interesting, but I just let them cool the night before, wrapped them in wax paper, then just unwrapped in the car, mixed up my protein frosting, and ripped and dipped the cakes! Perfection 😉 Cold pancakes are actually pretty tasty too!

Sorry for all these phone/instagram pictures in this post! I did not bring my DSLR on the trip and I am so glad I did not!

This is also when your mom turns around in the car and looks at you like your crazy 😉 Anyway, we made it down there by 9:30ish and stopped at the hotel my mom and brother would be at. I couldn’t check-in to orientation till 11 so we decided to get in some quick sight-seeing and lunch before I was dropped off. We went and said hello to the White House (this was my brother’s first time in DC and he didn’t seem very impressed). We stopped at Whole Foods to get lunch (the last decent thing I ate that day). Then we had to lug my heavy suitcase, food bag (breakfast and snack essentials), and overnight bag down many blocks to the campus.Read More

Some Great Eats In DC

April 30, 2014 by Rebecca @ Strength and Sunshine 22 Comments

First off, I think I should receive a reward for eating out so much over the last two weeks. Starting in South Carolina, all the way through my DC trip. I ~~have~~ had an extreme fear of eating out. Due to my multiple food allergies, dietary specifications, cross contamination fears, and food safety (i.e. salmonella, germs etc.), eating out gave me huge anxiety. Luckily my family rarely ever eats out anyway, but if we did have to go somewhere, I would just eat beforehand, or bring my own food. But that has to change now that I won’t be living at home with access to any food I want and space to cook. I love cooking and am perfectly content with making everything I eat, I love to do it, so it is not a burden. (That is going to be one of the hardest things next year! How will I be able to develop new recipes! O the humanity!). Anyway, I sucked it up over these past few weeks and I am glad to say that I have survived! I still don’t like to eat out and I have to do major research before going somewhere, but at least I know I can do it when need be.

Anyway, on to the goods! For breakfast each of the days I had just packed some creamy buckwheat cereal and quinoa flakes to heat up in the morning. However…the one down side to out hotel is you have to request a fridge. We did that but didn’t receive it until late on Tuesday. What we also didn’t realize was that they don’t provide microwaves to the rooms either and you can’t request one. I was screwed. But…the happy people down at the hotel restaurant allowed me to use their staff cafeteria microwave to make my breakfast each morning! How nice of them! I used my trusty big red ceramic bowl that I bought down in South Carolina for just this purpose (however in that hotel, we had a microwave). It all worked out though, happy day! I also drank copious amounts of unsweetened iced green tea from Starbucks the whole trip. It is so damn good, especially when I couldn’t have my normal hot mugs of tea since there was no way to get hot water in the hotel room, haha!

Our first meal in DC was of course Sweetgreen! I had been dreaming about those salads all year. There is something so magical about their greens and local ingredients! You can tell by the line we had to wait in, but o it was worth it!Read More

All The Walking, Sightseeing, And Barre3 {DC Day 2+3}

April 29, 2014 by Rebecca @ Strength and Sunshine 8 Comments

Tuesday was a full crazy day. No stopping, packed with good fun sightseeing, tons and tons of walking, and a blogger friend meet-up to top it off! I’ll keep this posts mostly photos, so you can revel in the beauty of DC. I loved looking through these pictures, they transported me back 🙂 The only negative to Tuesday was the weather. It we beautiful and sunny but so cold and windy and then it rained later in the day, but was pretty off and on. We made the best of it though! We started off by taking the Metro down to the Capitol, around to the Jefferson Memorial, and then made our way back down to the GW campus area…it was a very very long walk!

(Library of Congress)

(Finally got to see the Supreme Court! There was some decision going on so it was packed with demonstrators and cameras!)Read More

Welcome Back! {DC Day 1}

April 28, 2014 by Rebecca @ Strength and Sunshine 13 Comments

Welcome to my DC recap #1! I don’t know how many posts this will be, but I will make it bearable 😉 I just want to dive right in, but before I do I have to tell you. I just found out all my Finish the Sentence Friday answers have not been showing up in my Friday Finisher posts for the last month. I always wondered why no one really said anything about my answers. (Why didn’t you guys tell me there was nothing there!?). But I was really upset about last weeks. I had such a huge important answer announcing my GW decision. So I am re-posting it in this post and all the other finisher’s are fixed with the answer showing as well, so make sure you go back and read them!

The best decision I ever made was the one I officially made on Wednesday. After seeing GW last June I knew it was my #1 school. I kept dreaming about it, not only the school, but DC as well. I was so sad for days and days after we came back home. I knew I needed to go back, I knew that was where I wanted to take my life next. Well low-and-behold I applied and was accepted to my dream school and just got to visit again this week. Nothing has changed and the moment we arrived in DC, still driving in the car, I was holding back tears. The happiness and joy that that city brings me is something I have never felt. I have only ever lived here in Jersey and I haven’t experienced many places, but there is something about DC that makes me know 100% that is where I want to be. So GW is the absolute perfect place for me. First, it’s in the heart of the greatest city, literally 1 or 2 blocks from the White House. It has the most amazing opportunities at the Elliot School of International Affairs for my intended major of International Affairs focusing on national security and Middle East studies (as well as economics!). The internships I could get are like no other, the professors and speakers…just pure magic and wisdom. Everything is at my finger tips, everything I want, everything I need! The opportunity to break away from every mundane routine I have been living by for years and to finally branch out full force in to something so crazy, new, unpredictable, and exciting! So on Wednesday (the last morning we were there before we left), I went to the admissions office and signed my ~~life away~~ official enrollment agreement. When the girl at the desk handed me the paper, my mom got her phone out to snap a picture and I was trying my best to hold back the flood of tears again. I still can’t believe it. It still hasn’t really hit me yet. But I can’t stop thinking about it either. So with a full heart, I am proud to say that I am and will be forevermore a Colonial! Raise High Class of 2018!

Okay, now that that is cleared up, on to the recap!

We left for DC at 4:45am on Monday morning, I barely slept that night because I was so pumped! We got down pretty quickly and right when we entered DC I started tearing up, haha! I felt the welcome back vibes right away. At the hotel we were able to get in to our rooms right when we got there at 9ish which was awesome. We stayed at the Washington Marriott which is the same hotel I stayed at last summer. They have such amazing service and are so accommodating!

We had no time to lose though, so my mom and I threw out stuff into our room and ran out the door to get down to GW for my Colonial Day! It felt so amazing to be walking the streets of DC again in less than a year! It is such a beautiful, safe, clean, amazing city. Once we got down to the main building that introductions were taking place in, it was already time to head off to your specific school for talks by the deans and students. I just grabbed my official GW lanyard and headed over to another building. There we listened to the assistant dean of the Elliot School, a current senior, and an academic adviser. Everything seemed so serial! Is all the stuff really going to pertain to me in a few months? Apparently yes it is, haha! I left that conference room totally on cloud 9 and then we headed over to see a dorm on Foggy Bottom (they actually are not bad, at least the ones I saw). We also finally took a bus over to the Mount Vernon campus. I had no idea it was that far from the center of the city! All the way past Georgetown. If that campus had been closer I would have considered living on it. Vern is the green grass, beautiful new dorms, traditional residential campus, but completely out of the way and that defeats the whole purpose of living in the city!Read More

Academia In Spartanburg

April 17, 2014 by Rebecca @ Strength and Sunshine 10 Comments

It’s recap time! What a whirl-wind week. And now I need to gear up for DC on Monday. So much stimulation, so much to take in, in such a short time. But let’s start from the beginning. On Saturday night I went over to my grandparents to sleep and then wake-up and have my grandfather drop my mom and I off at Newark airport. Our flight was at 8:30 and of course we got there early and had to wait for o so long. I get so antsy sitting like that. O and a side note. I still have not gone in one of the new X-Ray scanners! I was specially approved by TSA with a yellow card, to just go through the metal detector and not take off my outerwear or shoes. Awesome! No radiation 😉

We landed in Greenville, SC around 10:20ish and then it was time to grab our little rental Ford Fiesta and hit the road to our hotel in Spartenburg. My mom requested early check-in but of course that was a no go and we couldn’t check-in. We decided to just head out to the Wofford campus and start our day…after lunch of course. We ended up at Fresh Market. Might I say that place is foodie heaven! Organic specialty food everywhere. The produce was all spectacular and flawless. And the best thing…they had…PSPs! When I saw those purple sweets I pretty much died right there. Too bad I couldn’t get any 🙁 I did pick up 2 organic Honey Crisps though. They were perfect! For lunch we grabbed massive salads at the salad bar which were delicious, simple and quick.Read More