Adventure Fuel

Let's talk about the most important part of any adventure, the food!  I had some darn good meals on our recent trip to Virginia and it's only fair that I share, so you can have a taste too.  Now here's the thing, we've been trying to really get our eating habits back to a healthy spot and Donnie and I are even planning to do Whole30 soon, but most of my meals on this trip were not so healthy and definitely not Whole30 approved.  I have this thing for southern food- grits, fried catfish, collard greens, fritters. You get the idea.  I'd like to say the amount of walking and swimming we did on this long weekend balanced out the poor food choices, but I really can't be sure that's true.  I'm above the Mason-Dixon line now, though, so I'm back into healthy mode!  I'm sure by now you're hoping I shut up and just get on with it, so I'll do just that!

We loved Southern Kitchen so much that we ate there twice.  It has this great 50s style decor and you immediately feel at home there.  I'm sure it would be a place we'd frequent, if we were locals.  My friends and I always joke about my love for "gross meats", so I may have been extra excited to see fried chicken livers on the menu.  They were perfect!  We finished our dinner there with huge pieces of homemade meringue pies and returned for an equally delicious breakfast on our way out of town.

I have this postcard of the giant Johnny Appleseed that I think an aunt gave me as a child, so I was pretty excited to see that Johnny Appleseed Restaurant was super close to our hotel and that the statue is still there.  The statue tells a little story and talks about the restaurants apple fritters, if you press a nearby button.  The boys loved it!  Our waitress greeted us with some of those apple fritters, warm and covered in powdered sugar.  Obviously they were amazing!  The wall between the two dining rooms was made from old orchard crates from the area.  The fritters alone are worth the visit, but the rest of our food was pretty darn good too!

Also worth mentioning are Granny's Pancake Cottage and Heartpine Cafe, located at Luray Caverns. Granny's Pancake Cottage had way more than pancakes and was a great stop for lunch.  We may have made our choice solely based on its cute name, but it was a good choice!  The Heartpine Cafe is in an old barn on the grounds of the Luray Valley Museum.  It's a little sandwich shop with wine tasting upstairs and lovely outdoor seating under a vine-covered pergola.