These Are A Few of My Favorite Things: Washington DC Pt 2

Hey all,

We recently came back from our last winter trip of the year, PRAISE JESUS. I love traveling but the last three months have been a whirlwind of going back and forth to Florida and all over the place. I’m ready to just be in North Carolina for a little bit! But our adventures were super fun so I can’t complain. Our most recent trip was going back to Washington DC just for a night. We made the trip to see Sum 41 (one of my bucket list bands) play at Shamrock Fest. No, I didn’t gets rat booty about Shamrock Fest, we literally bought tickets solely for Sum 41. And they were worth every penny! SO good live!! Anywho, we discovered some new favorite things while in DC that we would recommend to people traveling there. If you want to read my OG DC post click here. So without further ado, here are the new items:

1) Tour the Capitol building 

We were super lucky and knew someone who worked in the Capitol building and offered to give us a private tour (Thanks Kristen!!). This was super awesome because we hadn’t gotten to get close to the Capitol last time we traveled to DC as we mainly had focused on the monuments on that trip. The Capitol tour took us about an hour or so, and then we went quickly to the Library of congress before it closed. Both were equally as beautiful! We learned a lot while we were there too. If you know someone who works in the Capitol, take advantage and take the private tour! Otherwise you have to go with a LARGE group and you have to get tickets in advance. 

2) The Old Post Office Tower

There is a FREE (yes for real) observatory deck in the Trump Hotel (enter through the Starbucks) that allows you to see a 360 view of the city. This was 100% worth the three mile round trip we walked to see this, and the people who were working there were super nice and informative. They answered all of Madis questions lol. It also wasn’t crowded, and was a good alternative to the Washington Monument which isn’t set to reopen until spring of 2019. 

3) Good Stuff Eatery 

OMG YOU GUYS THIS PLACE WAS SO SO SO GOOD!! I was super excited to find this gem on Pinterest (and it got recommended by two DC’ers and one of our work friends who goes to DC frequently). It was incredibly delicious. Robert and I got a burger and fries, Madi got salad and Sondra got a chicken sandwich. Everyone loved their food! I heard their milkshakes are also amazing but don’t think I could have eaten all my food and drank a milkshake. Definitely recommend trying!! They have two locations: one near the Capitol and one in Georgetown. We went to the Capitol location and loved it. 

4) Georgetown

Literally such cute little houses (that cost up to 5M LOLWHATISLIFE) and just a good vibe. Although I didn’t love where we ate (&pizza, it was a’ight we all agreed 6/10. you just can’t beat Blaze man), Georgetown as a whole was cool to see and I wish we could have spent more time there and gone over to the university. 

So those were my new favorite things in DC this time around! I was thinking about making some itineraries for places we have been to a few times now, so you may see that in the near future. Trying to be more proactive about pinning my posts to my Pinterest, I just don’t have the stamina sometimes. Overall our trip was great, even though parts of it included people stomping on glass bottles behind us at the concert and getting locked in a parking garage (for real thought Robert and I were gonna die for like 5 mins) but it’s all good y’all we made it home with smiles on our faces! What do you love about DC? Definitely share and we will add it to our list! There is still so much to do/see. Like I said earlier in the post this was the last winter Franek vacation. We won’t be going anywhere until May! I’m low key excited to just stay home for a bit. With all this traveling, we’ve got some major cleaning to do before the mamas come up for graduation and Mother’s Day, yikes!! 

Thanks for reading,

- Olivia :)

#BookWorm: Always and Forever Lara Jean

#BookWorm: Always and Forever Lara Jean 

Hello fellow readers,

So I took a little hiatus from the slightly creepy thrillers and picked up a copy of Always and Forever Lara Jean by Jenny Han at the library. This is the final book in the Lara Jean trilogy and I am SO happy that Jenny Han decided to close the loop on many unanswered questions from fans with this book! Even though I’m in my mid-twenties I still LOVE Young Adult books. They are some of my favorites, and I hope I never get tired of them because there are so many good ones out there! I read Jenny Hans other trilogy The Summer I Turned Pretty in like five days when I first moved to Durham (see my reviews for that series here and here) and found the Lara Jean series shortly after. 

If you haven’t read the rest of the Lara Jean series, skip to the next paragraph of this post as this section contains spoilers from books one and two!! First I am in love with Lara Jean and Peter. Marrying my high school sweetaheart, I always love when books include a love story between two people who met in their high school years. The end of the second book Lara Jean starts dating Peter Kavinsky, the cool athlete at her school of which Lara Jean is the complete opposite. But somehow it works for them. Lara Jean’s sister (Margot?) is in college overseas and has a big opinion about Lara Jean’s relationship with Peter, and practically every other person who is dating someone in this book. Lara Jean and Peter are getting ready to go off to college, and they both want to go to UVA. However, Lara Jean also wants to consider other options (including UNC-Chapel Hill which while I’m not a Tar Heel fan it was cool having a local university referred to in this book). Lara Jean and Peter learn the art of complicated senior year relationships including deciding to stay together, doing long distance or drifting apart and becoming independent of each other.

Overall I’d give this book a 9/10, probably because I can relate to this book. I think I relate a lot actually, because Madi and I had a lot of similar conversations when choosing schools. Since I graduated the year before him it was slightly different as he had to decide where to go after I already had chosen USF. I do think about what it would have been like to do long distance all through college and whether or not outcomes would be the same, but luckily God lead him to USF for undergrad! I do have to say I was rooting for things to work out between Lara Jean and Peter no matter what schools they chose because I would have wanted people to root for me and Madi during that time of our relationship. 

Things are moving right along this month, March is flying by. We went over to DC for St. Patrick’s Day weekend for a concert and to explore more of the beautiful history filled city with Sondra and her boyfriend. I will  be sharing some more DC gems that we found soon!

Thanks for reading with me,

- Olivia 

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things: Charlotte, NC

Hey everyone,

Last weekend we traveled over to Charlotte, North Carolina for the first time ever as a belated Christmas gift to Madi and Valentines Day gift to each other. We had such a good time! Madi describes Charlotte as an “in between” city, meaning it’s bigger than Tampa but smaller than Chicago. It was the perfect size to safely walk around and explore. Not ever having been there, there was plenty to see and do! Here are our few of our favorite things from the Buzz City:

1) Midwood Smokehouse

Talk about some good old southern barbecue! This place was a delicious spot for lunch! I thought it was decently priced, and would have been a good dinner place too but was a little ways out of the city, and we didn’t want to have to move our car once we parked it downtown. Definitely recommend the Mac & Cheese! YUM!

2) Amelie’s Bakery

This cute little French coffee, sandwich and pastry shop was a great find! Open late (which worked well with our schedule this trip) and a wide selection of goodies made me want to bust out my big girl pants and eat all night! I settled for splitting a small cake slice with Madi though ;) (yes he actually ate half!)

3) Fahrenheit

Y’all. This was my favorite part of the trip! It’s a rooftop bar/restaurant that is free to go up and just chill on the patio and watch the sunset. They don’t ID until after 7pm, which in the winter is just before the perfect time to watch the sunset.

4) The Green Park

A cute little park that would be perfect for just hanging out, sipping a coffee or smoothie, or reading a book on the lawn. I love the tribute to books! 

5) The Original Pancake House

Oh. My. Lanta. This place is the bomb. Definitely one of the best priced breakfast places we’ve been to. The omelette was huge! They also have so many different types of pancakes and everything we ate was so delicious!

There were plenty more good eats and places we could have explored while in Charlotte, but these were our favorite of what we got to do for our first trip! We did also go to a Hornets game to watch Duke player Luke Kennard play some minutes for the Pistons vs Hornets game, which was super fun too! If you know of anywhere good to go to eat or fun things to do that we missed out on let us know! I will be heading back to Charlotte for sure in the New Year to see Justin Timberlake (whoop whoop!!) with some of my friends. 

Thanks for keeping up,
- Olivia