Here's Hubs standing next to the paella pan at the restaurant we ate at in Ibizia, Spain. I doubt even he could have eaten that whole thing. lolz
Well I put on 13 lbs. during the cruise, but am already taking it all back off(9 lbs. off as of today)by doing intermittent fasting since Friday. Another week or so and I'll be right as rain again. 8-)
Onward to the meal planning!
This is what was planned for last week...........
1. Sunday--Twisted Root Burger
2. Monday--No Clue
3. Tuesday--No Clue
4. Wednesday--No Clue
5. Thursday--No Clue
6. Friday--No Clue
7. Saturday--No Clue
And here's what actually happened(we were on the ship until Tuesday)......
1. Sunday--Crusty Bread w/EVOO and Balsamic, Salad, Calamari, Paella, dessert I can't remember and oh, so much wine!
2. Monday--Endive Salad, Filet Mignon, Cheese Plate for dessert
3. Tuesday--Bruschetta, Ribs and Shrimp, Apple Brown Betty
4. Wednesday--Some Chicken dish w/Rice on the plane, a roll, a crumbly cake, a fancy UK Hot Pocket and many Dr. Pepper Zero Sugars
5. Thursday--Muffaletta Pizza
6. Friday--Leftover Muffaletta Pizza
7. Saturday--Beef Fajitas
What got taken out of the freezer last week....
* Nothing
What got put into the freezer last week....
* 1 pack of Catfish
* 1 pack of Salmon
* 3+lbs. of Pork Tenderloin
Last week we spent $167.89 on grocery shopping for April. I had an Ibotta Bonus to hit and dby gosh I was going to get there. ;-)
Total shopping come to $538.55 for April. There are 0 shopping days left in April so I am done for the month, obviously.
Rebate monies earned this month so far.....
I've earned $243.50 on Ibotta in April.
I've earned $24.50 on Shopmium in April.
I've earned $32.50 on Alexa app in April.
I've earned $11.24 on Kroger Cash Back in April.
I've earned $29.39 on TaDa in April.
I've earned $1.50 on Checkout51 in April.
I've earned $32.41 on Aisle, etc.
I've earned 35,644.00 points on Fetch from food shopping in April.
I've earned 8,250 points from food shopping on Shop Kick in April.($33.00)
I've earned 3,497 Points on My Points in April.($16.63)
I've earned 0 SB from food shopping on Swag Bucks in April.
That is $331.30 in rebates(not counting Shop Kick/Fetch/MyPoints/KCB/Alexa)on $538.55 of grocery spending so in reality it's $207.25 in food spending after the rebate apps I count. I now separate out the Food Bank donations and don't count those in the grocery spending.
My savings percentage for the last week was 56.35% and the monthly savings total for Aprilcomes in at 45.22% spent so far.
Leftovers going into this week...Fajita filling.
Here is this week's "food plan".....
1. Sunday--Cheeseburger(bun optional), Teriyaki Green Beans, Stuffed Mushroom Caps
2. Monday--Catfish, Shrimp, Green Beans
3. Tuesday--1/2 Subway Tuna Sub
4. Wednesday--1/2 Subway Tuna Sub
5. Thursday--Brisket, Baked Sweet Potato Fries
6. Friday--Leftovers
7. Saturday--Leftovers
My meal plan blew up when we lost power for 2+ days. This is my revised plan since I got back online this morning. 8-))
What is getting fixed and served at your house this week?
Was last week's plan successful, did you go off plan or did you not even plan what was going to be eaten last week?
The time finally arrived for the big adventure of 2013 to take place--our Summer Road Trip.
Hubs sister was finally remarrying in August so since none of the rest of her siblings/family were going to go to Illinois to see her tie the knot(again), we decided we would go.
And since we were going all the way across a third of the US for this grand event, we figured Hubs might as well take some of all that vacation time he has saved up for the year, and make this a vacation.
I put out a call to friends and family, letting them know where we were headed and said we'd like to see/visit with anyone who could stand to have us around if we could work it in. Nothing was planned ahead at this point, except for being at the wedding, so we just let the adventure grow organically from there.
By the week before we left, all the plans/stops were firmed up.
We headed out the morning of August 13th.
It was a Tuesday.
We rented a car for this trip. Since we were traveling so many miles and my minivan is elderly(getting where it needs work and doesn't get the greatest gas mileage), it made sense not to pile those miles up on the Mango-mobile(named after my dead Chihuahua), but to spend the cash and let Enterprise's car take the hit.
We got this mid-sized beauty for the ride.
Here is Hubs posing during our first rest stop with the Adventure-mobile.....
Another shot of Hubs at the rest stop area......
It was roomy enough for us plus had quite a bit of trunk and backseat room(which we tried out best to fill up with crap by the time we left to return home).
It even had XM Radio which was great and meant we didn't have to keep finding local station signals every hundred miles or so, amidst the static.
We were cruising along that first day, west on I-80 making our escape from Pennsyltucky, when we came upon a State Police detour. Seems a massive accident on 80 had closed down a stretch of it totally, shortly before we got to that point, so we had to detour through beautiful downtown Brockway....population about 2,000.
You may have seen the little video I posted back during the trip when we were stuck in the traffic jam leading into Brockway. It's a tiny little one stop light town(not even a town, a borough)with a single 2 lane main street.
Once we got to the main street, we hung a left onto Rte. 28 and headed through beautiful downtown Brockway. About a 1/4 mile past the BI-LO grocery store and the middle of town I spotted this beauty of a house for sale. It would make a sweet place to retire to, don't you think?
I looked it up online once we got to the hotel that night and I believe it was listed for under $100K.
You could walk or bike from there to the grocery store, the Dollar General or even Mickey D's for that matter.
Once we got out of Brockway, it was a hilly windy ride on country roads back to the Interstate.
I noticed some old farm houses we passed and from the clothes hung on the clotheslines and the lack of power lines around, I could tell there was a community of Amish or Old Order Mennonite in this area.
And then we passed a gravel lane and I got off this shot.....
Yep, an Amish community of some size is located here.
Then we saw this......
and I started asking Hubs to stop so I could do a little tombstone picture taking for F.A.G.
But we had already lost so much time on the detour and it was the first day so Hubs didn't stop.
Then we hit this.....
Ah yes, the joys of road construction in PA.
It never ends.....but luckily this patch was not so large and didn't hold us up much.
And you will notice that we are STILL behind that 18 wheeler truck for the entirety of this detour.
Finally back to I-80.
Then a stop for a late-ish lunch at Pizza Hut outside the town were Daughter went to college her first year, Clarion.
Then back on I-80 into Ohio and finally we arrived at our hotel for the night, in Milan, OH.
Milan OH....birthplace of Thomas Edison.
Bet you didn't know that!
And neither did I until we arrived there and I saw directional signs to his birthplace, though we didn't have time to visit it.
Here's what we found in our room.....
A ginormous whirlpool tub IN the bedroom.
They gave us an extra large room(which we hadn't asked for)but didn't charge us extra since the whirlpool was broken.
It would have made a very nice ice bucket IF we were throwing a party in there(and believe me, there was enough space in this room to throw one!).
Then I opened the curtains and looked out our bedroom window at the view.........
Oh goody....a corn field. How exciting!
I guess it beats looking out onto a parking lot though, right?
After resting a bit we headed out to find something for dinner. We drove down the highway south into Norwalk, OH. After driving into the center of downtown, we headed back north a bit and stopped at the Fortune Buffet.
The food was pretty good except for a few items that were super spicy, which usually aren't so hot at most Chinese restaurants.
They should bottle and sell their Hot and Sour Soup as a sinus treatment. One sip of it and my sinuses were cleared right out!!!
After dinner I had to get my photo taken to immortalize the stop.
I hope the Chinese gods don't take offense at me making bunny ears on that lion....
After dinner, we stopped along the way back to the hotel at a local K-Mart. Partly to get some exercise and walk off dinner and partly because we needed to buy a "Church key" because we forgot to bring one from home.
And because we are who we are, we walked and shopped that store, buying various and sundry items and got into the car and realized we forgot the one thing we went in there to buy.
Doh.
While in K-Mart, I went over to the drink aisle to see if they carried any Vernor's Ginger-Ale.
Sister in-laws old boyfriend was from OH and since he has lived in Weehawken, NJ for many years now since she moved to IL, she was always stopping in OH to buy and bring him some Vernor's Ginger-Ale when she came out East, because it's just "Deliciously Different".
Image from groceries-express.com
And as I took the Ginger-Ale off the shelf, I turned to face the opposite shelves and saw this.....
Here's a close up since looking at adult beverages is always interesting....
The skies opened up and angels descended from the heavens.......they sell BOOZE in K-Mart in Ohio!!!
Except on Sundays because you just can't have people getting liquored up on the Lord's Day evidently.....
So needless to say, we left with some adult beverages(Great Lakes Burning River beer and Mike's hard lemonade) to enjoy back at the hotel and to cart with us to our next stop in IL.
Thus ended Day One of the Great Road Trip of Summer 2013.
We started with the Amish and ended with booze.....nice combo, huh?
A beautiful sunrise on Wednesday morning.
Being bored with the cafe in the motel for breakfast(we had used 1 voucher and had 1 left for breakfast to use on Thursday before we left), Hubs ventured out early to forage for morning sustenance while I tried to pry my eyelids open.
I had introduced him to The Fractured Prune last trip.
Seems he was hankering for more 'pruney donuts' this trip.
The FP is a gourmet donut shop that originated in OC. A few years ago when we had a teacher's strike at the local school and the kids were out of school for 4 weeks at the beginning of that school year, I had taken my boys and one of their friends to Virginia Beach and then, OC and had dragged them to the FP for breakfast one morning.
There were only 2 locations at that time but it seems the FP has caught on and there are scads of outlets down in that area and beyond. The only problem is they are only open from 7am to noon during the off-season.
They make cake type donuts.....fresh and hot.
When they pull them from the deep fryer, you tell them what glaze to put on your donut and if you want toppings....like jimmies, chocolate chips, coconut, nuts, marshmallows, etc.
There are 'regular' combinations that are popular that they have on the menu you can get or you can make up your own.
This is something like what Hubs carted back to the room.....still hot.
They may not look like much, but if your computer had Smell-o-vision, you'd be licking your screen.
Seriously, if I lived down there, I'd weigh 600 lbs.....
This was just the incentive Hubs needed to pry my off of the mattress....at least until I ate 3 and then I just wanted to lay back down for 4 hours and sleep the sugar/carb coma off.lol
We did some sightseeing on Wednesday. Up in Delaware near Bethany Beach they are replacing the little bridge with this monster....
It's the same type of construction as the bridge on Route 1 that replaced/bybassed the one over Route 13 near St. George DE. Actually it's called the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal Bridge. It was one of the 1st cable-stayed bridges in the country and the only one in the Delaware Valley. This one just seems gargantuan for it's purpose.
Gee, did I just talk about another bridge on my Maine trip post? Maybe I have this latent 'thing' for bridges and engineering, huh? ;-)
When I took the kids during the teacher's strike to OC I noticed these big concrete things along the shoreline as we traveled up the coast from OC to Rehobeth.....
This shot was taken from the car so it only shows the top half. They are quite tall and obtuse, sticking out from the scenery.
I just discovered that they are fire towers that were built along the coastline in NJ and DE during World War II. Fire Tower is a misnomer since these were really enemy spotting & artillery aiming towers. Our military feared/expected a Pearl Harbor type attack on Trenton and the Philly munitions and shipbuilding yards at the head of the Delaware River, so these towers were built along the route to guard against the German battleships they thought were going to sneak up the River......ships that never arrived. Quite a few have yet to be torn down and there is a group taking on restoring them as they are historically significant.
This shot thrills me yet makes me sad....
The shoreline of Delaware is NOT totally developed and settled yet. There are towns dotting the shore but there is still open, undeveloped acreage without huge condos or hotels on it. This is a big contrast to the shoreline once you hit the Maryland line which is wall-to-wall monolithic buildings. There are some state parks on the beaches in Delaware too so some of the beaches will never be developed. This was a piece of a state park I saw from the road near where one of the fire towers is located. It just gave me chills to see a piece of shoreline without a building or a trace of a person having been there. An unsullied place....well, except for the road.lol
Besides buying groceries again on a vacation....lol....we went to Roses.
When I was growing up, our area was lousy with Roses stores. It was the Woolworth's of my part of the South. The Wal-mart of it's day.
Now it's barely hanging on. It concentrates on high-end dollar store junk....sort of like a Family Dollar or Dollar General, but the stores are usually bigger. There are still Roses in VA, DE, MD and NC that I know of.
If we are near a Roses as the holidays approach, we always stop in for this....
I am NOT a fan of fruitcake per se, but.....
Claxton's Fruit Cake is da bomb! As Alton Brown might say.... Serioulsy. Good. Eats.
But being the cheap, miserly, frugal gal I am, I refuse to pay $9 a lb. to buy it locally up north or online.
It was $3.50 a lb. at Roses. We stocked up......for eating purposes, not gift-giving purposes so if you are on my gift list, don't be a'feared that I'm sending you a fruitcake for Christmas.
You are safe....
After lugging fruitcake bricks to the car it was time for an early dinner so we headed over to West OC to search out a BBQ place we had seen in the phone book.
We found it quickly enough but gee, it was CLOSED like every other restaurant down there in the off-season.
So we drove down the main drag for a bit until I smelled a heavenly porcine aroma and turned me head and saw this....
A kitchy old motel sign, a motel office with a huge B for BUDWEISER Neon sign in the window and an OPEN Flag waving us in from the other side of the office building were a BBQ Joint was perfuming the air with pig from it's on site smoker pitt.
They had me at pig.
We had stumbled upon bbq heaven.
It's name is Rascal's in West Ocean City MD.
If you hanker for smoked/barbecued chicken, brisket or pork, check it out. Good eats and cheap eats!
We stumbled along to the back entrance of the building into a tiny poolside bar with a few boofs and sat down.
In walked Roscoe Nelson, the owner/manager of the Alamo and Rascal's.
Roscoe turned out to be a pretty colorful character.
He told us all about the history of the Alamo and it's original owner and then about himself.
He knows all the locals in OC and told us to get Denny, the guy who owns the tavern next door to our motel, to tell him the "one armed man" said hi.
Did I mention that Roscoe has one arm?
He lost it when he was 12.
After about a minute and a half of talking to him you forget he's got one arm....that is, until he brings the subject up.
Seems because Roscoe hires pretty foreign women to work his bar and more pretty foreign women live in his motel during the in-season when they work at the hotels in OC, rumors of Prostitution Rings at the Alamo started going around. And drunk men started showing up in the late evenings/early mornings looking for the whores.....wreaking all kinds of havoc.
Bullet holes in motel windows anyone?
The gal working the bar & tables when we were there was decidely American, not foreign. Though this rumour started years ago people still turn up at the motel looking for some 'comfort' besides the bbq kind.
Figures I'd end up at an infamous seedy motel owned by a one armed man, with fabled Russian hookers.
Even when I try to be boring, I can't. I can't make stuff like this up.....lol
Here's a you tube vlog that the DC paper did on the story.....
I personally liked this article located HERE that the same Washington City Paper outfit also put out.
And before you ask, no, I didn't play horseshoes or "party" with Cory and Roger. ;-)
The motel is decidedly flea bag-esque but worth the trip for the 'Cue!
After a leisurely breakfast in our motel's cafe Thursday morning-served by Fran who after 2 pots of coffee in her by 8am was chatty as a flock of seagulls fighting over a tourists dropped bag of salted peanuts-we packed it up and headed home.
No lingering since we had to get north of Philly before rush hour started at 3pm.
Here's one more pre-sunrise shot of the Atlantic Ocean.
Funny thing I noticed this trip......usually I can smell the sea air miles before we hit the coast. This time, not so much. The beach didn't smell like the beach should. Hubs even commented on it. Maybe our noses have shorted out from old age or something....lol
Photo courtesy of LOL Dogs(http://ihasahotdog.com/)
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,
"Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!"
"No hurry!" said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.
"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,
"Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed--
Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed."
"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
"After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!"
"The night is fine," the Walrus said.
"Do you admire the view?
-excerpt from "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll
Yep!
Like the Walrus & The Carpenter and the pup above, I eated it......I eated allll over Maine and I eated it ALL....but it was NO Hot Dog!lol
Not quite Oysters tho.....
But....
It was clams....
and scallops....
and clams....
and haddock....
and clams.....
and lobster....
and clams....
and shrimp....
and did I mention CLAMS yet?
And not those nasty rubber band tasting/texturing clam strips you get frozen in the grocery store.
It was whole, full bellied Ipswich clams!
Mmmmmmm......
Oh and then there was the excitement on the trip home....
and then the *fun bonus* after I got home later that night, which stretched into even *MORE FUN* for the next 2 days.
I will spare you the lovely pictures of the Fun Bonus Times later in the week(when I get around to recounting the trip and it's aftermath).
So I'm back online and slowly getting up to speed and getting laundry done and my bad self's head back in the game called REAL LIFE.
And I'm doing it kicking and screaming in protest the entire way!!!
Ayuh....
So bear with me as I move rather slowly with new posts and tying up old business from last month, and most importantly as I catch up with all my online friends' blogs and lives.
It was so nice to get away but it's always nice to come home....
Stay tuned for more. ;-)
"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,
"To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"The butter's spread too thick!"
"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.
Hello from an undisclosed location!.....the photo & the post title should give you some hints. ;-)
I bet ya'll had thought I had fallen off the face of the Earth.
Nope.
I am alive and well somewhere near the location of the photo above.
I finally got internet access for awhile and thought I'd check in.
I still have seafood to eat and Rite-Aids to pillage but should be home and back online by Saturday.
So keep on keepin' on being frugal and I'll be seeing ya'll soon.
