Yesterday, Josh and I took a fun afternoon trip up to Northampton, MA! He gets out of work at 2:00 p.m., and he stopped by the condo before we left a little after 3:00 p.m. Northampton is a little less than 40 minutes from the condo on the highway, so it was a pretty easy drive up there. I’ve only been to Northampton twice before, but luckily Josh used to work up in that area so he’s familiar with the downtown area.

Being me, I planned out the whole trip for us based on where we wanted to go and when the places closed for the night. It was nice to have a bit of a game plan in place especially since we were going to get there in the late afternoon.

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Our first stop was Raven Used Books, and, as you could imagine, I just wandered silently around the store in my happiest happy place. I also felt a bit overwhelmed because there were so many books. There was literally every category of books there but I stayed mostly in the literature section and history/president section. I could have spent an entire day in there, though.

These are the two books I got. I’ve been trying to get Dreams from My Father from the town library but it’s never available. It’s Obama’s first memoir and I’m looking forward to reading it. I’ve also been trying to get 11/22/63 from the library but it’s an 800 page book, and there’s no way I can read that in the 3 weeks you can take books out for. Luckily, I found it at the book store and it was only $1!

I dropped the shopping bags off in Josh’s car before we walked down to Fitzwilly’s for dinner. I had been there before once with my mom for lunch, and the food was really good. We both got a beer and a sandwich. Mine was Cloud Candy from Mighty Squirrel Brewing and a grilled Reuben.

We had some more time to kill after dinner before we went to Progression Brewing so we took a walk down Main Street and up by Smith College. We ended up walking for about a half hour, and it was a good way to work off our dinner.

Since yesterday was in the mid-70s, not humid, and a bit cloudy, we sat outside on the patio at Progression. The patio area faced the Northampton train station, so we saw the train stop by a few times.

It was a super fun afternoon/night and the perfect little day trip. The funny part is that our dinner at Fitzwilly’s was our first actual dinner out together; our usual go-tos are breweries or ice cream. But it was nice to have a sit-down dinner together. I’m looking forward to our next adventure—TBD!