Setting up our Northern Virginia Trip

You’ve probably heard about or read the posted articles from our recent Northern Virginia trip (Jimmy’s Old Town Tavern, Rocket Frog Brewery, Two Twisted Posts, Appalachian Trail – Harper’s Ferry, Appalachian Trail – Snicker’s Gap). After some consideration, we thought it would be beneficial to show you how we set it up. For us, this part is like a crossword puzzle, both challenging and fun. The excitment of planning!

Below is our process we worked through in setting up the trip.

Basic Decisions

How long should we go?

Since we had just come off a 2 week trip to California (see our write ups of the Armstrong Redwoods and Bald Mountain Trail), we thought a longer weekend would be good.

Where to want to go?

In 2018, we went on a trip to Virginia and discovered there was a lot more to see. We stayed a couple days in the Charlottesville area and a couple days in Northern Virginia. However, we left knowing we could easily spend more time there and be quite busy.

What time of year should we go?

For our convenience, we locked in on an “extended weekend”, or a 4 day trip of Sunday through Wednesday. Not exactly a weekend? It was for some friends we wanted to connect with for one evening. They work weekends and are off on Monday and Tuesday.

Then we felt that the fall season would be good because venues (in this case Wineries-Breweries-Distilleries) would be less crowded than the summer.

Please note that this can be problematic if your destination is seasonal, therefore you’ll want to confirm your venues will actually be open when you get there. We did a quick search of wineries (see below), to confirm they’d be open when we were planning our trip.

Does this trip require the assistance of an outside planner, like a travel agent?

We thought since this was a shorter local trip, due to the simplicity, we could easily fill in our own details.

Once we landed on how long, where, when, and what time of year, we looked at putting together the details.

The Research

Transportation

On almost every trip we are planning, we start with the transportation planning first. Our considerations for this trip were; do we drive or take public transportation? After researching and reviewing the details, we decided to drive based on the following factors:

1. Public transportation could only get us so far. The end of public transportation still left us around 30 minutes in good traffic to get to our end destination. That meant we’d need transportation to wherever we were staying (Uber is around $60 each way). It would also require needing a rental car for the time we were there.
2. We’d have to switch from train to the DC Metro, to a bus, and still need an Uber/Lyft from the bus station.
3. Public transportation schedules were not convenient – most local trains do not operate from the nearest train station (to us) on Saturdays and Sundays. Simply put, we’d have to drive further (or take an Uber/Lyft) to get to a departing train station (45 minute minimum). The bus from the last Metro stop required significant jockeying, adding considerable time in between.
4. It wasn’t cheaper to take public transportation.
5. There wasn’t a time savings.
6. If driving, we’d driving around Washington, DC during times of least traffic. Sunday mid-day (on the way) and Wednesday mid-day (the return) are normally fairly light with few traffic issues.

So after considering 4-5 different modes of public transportation, a difficult schedule, overall cost (even with the tolls/gas), and traffic congestion ease, and that we’d have a car once we arrived, it made more sense to drive.

Note: In both Spain and Italy, we almost exclusively used public transportation and it was an amazing experience.

Destination

It’s good to get a rough idea what you want to do to assist with where you end up staying.

Because we chose our calendar time to be Sunday through Wednesday, we realized some wineries might not be open during the week. We also realized that unlike the area where we live (where wineries are open only Fri-Sun), venues were open during the week days, not just weekends.

We started with a basic Google search of “wineries near Leesburg, VA”.

Since we were driving, we looked for ones along the way on Sunday and in the general area where we would be staying.

Our friends suggested places for our Tuesday schedule. This is the classic “the locals know where all the good stuff is” scenario. Always ask a local. Even when overseas, locals are more often than not an invaluable resource.

Where to Stay – Accommodations

For this trip, we narrowed down our factors for where we would stay to the following:

1. Location – our primary goal was to find good places to blog about, specifically with hiking and wine tasting. As a result, we wanted to end up at a place that required minimal driving.
2. Use of the accommodations – we decided up front we didn’t need to use the location for cooking, but a bed and breakfast would be nice. We also wanted a dedicated bathroom. Under those conditions, we determined either BnBs via AirBnB/Homeaway, or most local hotels appeared would suffice.

As part of our  we did a search of Expedia, Hotels.com, AirBnB, Homeaway. The search revealed a number of places in the general area. We started to narrow it down by selecting the ones close to the wineries we were interested in and still only pretty close (half hour) from hiking Harper’s Ferry.

In this case, we found a place via AirBnB that was within walking distance of one of the wineries we wanted to visit (Casanel Vineyards and Winery). We initially thought it was part of the winery, but discovered it was not when we got there. It wasn’t a problem, just something we noted. We then made the decision that we would end up at Casanel on Sunday just before checking in.

From there we had our foundation and started to build our itinerary.

Places to Go – Setting the Itinerary

Another place we wanted to go was Rocket Frog Brewing Company as one of our friends works there. Rocket Frog is located in Hearndon, so we thought it’d be a good idea to each lunch prior to going to the brewery. We also locked in Dry Mill Vineyard & Winery to go to in between Rocket Frog and Casanel. Part of this process included checking out Google Maps for drive times to ensure we were being realistic.

Sunday was almost fully planned (except where to eat), drive, eat, Rocket Frog, Dry Mill, Casanel, then check in to the bed and breakfast.

Both Monday and Tuesday we wanted to hike in the morning then wine taste and eat dinner later. Since both of our friends had off on Tuesday, but only one on Monday, we decided to plan around that. Our friends invited us to dinner at their place Monday night, leaving us to plan our day.

For Monday – we figured on hiking the Appalachian Trail in the morning, after which we would decide “on the fly” which wineries we wanted to do wine tasting. On our way to the trail, we saw a dozen wineries, and Dianne did a quick search of reviews, prompting which ones we would go to – Two Twisted Posts, Breaux, then heading over to Stone Tower Winery where the friend who had to work was.

For Tuesday, we decided to spend the entire day together and our friends picked the venues. We started at La Petit LouLou for breakfast and cappucino, went hiking on the Appalachian Trail – Snicker’s Gap, Bear Chase Brewery, Bluemont Winery and ended up going out to dinner at the Market Table Bistro.

As previoulsy mentioned, we relied on “locals” to set up part of our trip. You should also notice that we left with only a skeleton plan for both Monday (hiking, wine tasting) and Tuesday (hiking, wine tasting) without locking in all the details.

Wrap up

Essentially we worked through the following iterative process one item at a time:

1. How long
2. Where to go
3. Time of year
4. Planner versus plan ourselves
5. How do we get there
6. Where to Stay – Accommodations
7. Places to Go while there

When you’re setting up a trip yourself, this works for general guidelines, but we do not always go in this order. Depending on the trip, the order can change, and/or should change based on the circumstances of the trip.

For example, sometimes you may be attending an actual event, which could easily dictate the season, date, and location from the start. That sets the basic format/agenda of your journey. After that, you fill in around the event. This entails ensuring enough time on either side to attend the event and possibly enjoy other things in the area.