Blog for adaysouting.com

There are some great day trips out there so you can make the most of a day with mom. You can score big with mom by planning the perfect day trip for the whole family! I hope someone is planning a day without laundry and cooking for me. Hint Hint. Here are a few outings I found..

Biltmore’s Festival of Flowers - Asheville, North Carolina
Carroll County Farmers Market Mother’s Day Show - Westminster, Maryland
Crozet Arts & Crafts Festival Spring Show - Crozet, Virginia
Gadsby’s Mother’s Day Tours - Alexandria, Virginia
Mother’s Day Spring Fling & Friends of Bluemont Art Show - Bluemont, Virginia
Mother’s Day Tea in the Garden at Tudor Place – Washington D.C.
Mother’s Day Weekend at Ladew Gardens - Monkton, Maryland
Mount Vernon’s Spring Garden Party - Mount Vernon, Virginia

A Day’s Outing has discovered some great things that might make searching for your day trip or weekend outing even more fun.  We are thrilled to introduce handmade cards and jewelry by artists that we adore.  Look for jewelry from Lori McLean and gift cards from Louisa Wimberger’s company, Weehah!, under the heading “One of our Favorite Things”.  You’ll find their amazing work on the website at the bottom of the pages where we provide in-depth details about a specific outing.  A simple scroll to the bottom of the page will reveal their treasures.  You never know what you’ll find, and you might just want to treat yourself to something special.

And, if you know our husbands, I really want the Roman cast ring embedded with 2 diamonds and Cathy loves the Raven Necklace.  It’s not too late for an extra special Mother’s Day present.

Last week while driving to the Florida Keys to take a needed vacation (thank you for covering for me Elizabeth!), we took several detours off I95.  We ended up spending half a day in St. Mary’s, a morning in St. Augustine, and an afternoon on Jekyll Island.

On the way down we stopped in St. Mary’s, Georgia.  It was just as charming and peaceful as I had imagined when we had gone speeding by on past trips.  The town is full of shops and restaurants, the nicest waterfront park and even a Submarine Museum.  I actually got my husband to relax and sit on a porch swing with me at their park.   It was a great break for the kids to play on the playground, eat a real lunch and have an entertaining conversation with a semi-intoxicated, but very funny man on a fishing boat.  We also enjoyed Lang’s Seafood’s great waterfront setting, with Georgia pinks (shrimp) literally right off the boat.  I would also like to go back and spend time at the Cumberland Island National Seashore, it looked beautiful.

On the way home we ended up getting off I95 and driving the A1A from Flagler Beach to St. Augustine, Florida.  The drive was beautiful, even my headset wearing and iPod loving children were staring out the windows and convinced us to stop at the beach near Marineland.  As a side note, unless you arrange in advance to do one of the dolphin encounter programs at Marineland, there’s not much to see other than other people swimming with the dolphins.  We ended up stopping in St. Augustine, the oldest city in America.  This was our second trip there and I love it.  The Spanish influence is so strong at times you feel like you’re in a little town in Spain.  We toured the fort and ate at a great Italian restaurant downtown that because I am getting old, I can’t remember the name of and can’t recognize online.  If you have never seen alligators up close, the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park is also a must.  It was amazing to see all of the wild birds roosting there, knowing their chicks are safe from raccoons, etc. with the gators below.  Heaven forbid if a chick fell out of their nest!

We then drove a few hours north and stopped for an early and unfortunately very quick dinner on Jekyll Island. It was beautiful.  After dinner we walked out on a huge sandbar to look for sand dollars.  The sign in the visitor’s center says “that once your feet have touch the sand, you will always want to come back”.  I certainly can’t wait to go back and spend more time there.

Even my “gotta get there now” husband agreed that stopping along the way, eating real meals and seeing the sites was a much better way to go.  He even let me drive some.

We would love to let everyone know who is helping us with our Beta testing that we sincerely appreciate it.  It’s so exciting to see the numbers of users climb everyday.  Please keep telling your friends and family about us!

Thank you for signing up for Go Floyd.  We are refining the way we return results and you’ll see more and more outings each week.  Please continue to let us know if you are one of the few who can’t view Go Floyd in your email client.  We are still trying to hit that tough moving target.

A big thank-you to those of you who have submitted Travel Tales, especially Amie!  We would love to have them across the nation. Please let us know about places you like, just a quick 2-3 sentence blurb is great.

As you enjoy A Day’s Outing, here are some of the things to keep an eye out for in our categories:

Fairs, Events & Festivals - includes County Fairs, State Fairs, Wine Festivals, Strawberry Festivals.

Parks & Gardens – includes Botanical Gardens, Arboretums, Zoos, Aquariums, Town Parks.

History & Heritage – includes Battlefields, Civil War Reenactments, Famous Historic Homes, Museums.

Farms, Food & Wine – includes Vineyards, Farm Tours, Wine Tasting, Farmer’s Markets.

Antiques & Auctions – Antiques Stores, Live Auctions, Art Shows.

Wheelchair Accessible – pulls events and destinations from our entire database that are specifically designated as accessible.

Family & Children – Museum Programs deigned for kids, Classes for Children, Outdoor Hikes, Great Parks, Beaches, Festivals.

Theatre & Stage – Plays, Outdoor Summer Theatre, Jazz Concerts, Free Live Music, Dance Productions

Museum & Art – Famous National Museums, Small Local Museums, Traveling Art Exhibits, Art Shows.

Unique Sports & Games(soon to be named & Hobbies) – Minor League Baseball, Horse Shows, Dog Shows, BMX races, Bird Watching, Bike Trails, Fishing Spots.

Nature & Outdoors – National and State Parks and their Activities, Great Hikes, Wildlife Viewing.

Thank you again and again. Please remember we love and need all feedback. Keep your fingers crossed for us as we roll out nationwide!

Cathy and I took a trip down to Florida last weekend to visit with our database developer extraordinaire, Chris.  We met way too early at the airport to catch a flight out of Charlottesville.  Once we were settled into our airplane seats, I pulled out my laptop and began showing her pages of our source code that I had saved on my desktop.  I wanted to go over our meta descriptions and see what we might need to change.  She looked at my computer and then looked at me, laughed and said, “Before I met you I would have been sitting here reading a People magazine, but now I’m looking at $%#@*&^ source code, instead.”  We both laughed and talked about how much our lives had changed since we began working on A Day’s Outing.

It has been a crazy rollercoaster ride.  It is true, before we started A Day’s Outing we would have been reading a fashion or travel magazine, but no more.  Now it’s data, users, revenue and SEO.  All in all, I couldn’t be happier with the change.

Just a quick note for all of the Martha Stewart moms out there…  I used to be one of those moms who tried to do all the holidays perfectly with her children.  At Valentine’s we’d get out the pink and red construction paper, doilies and glitter and make the homemade cards.  We would bake my favorite sugar cookies from Cook’s Illustrated, decorate them and then deliver them to neighbors and the kid’s classrooms.  I have to say I loved it and would end up staying up by myself decorating and eating the cookie dough.

Well, have I said I have been a little busy lately?  My second grade daughter of course made her own Valentine’s two weeks ahead of time with everyone’s names perfectly written on the cards for her class.  I kind of forgot about the fifth grader’s class.  Friday morning at 6:30, my son wants to know where his Valentine’s are.  Thinking quickly, I remembered a bag of Halloween Skittles still on the upper reaches of the pantry and tossed them to him.  What does he think?  He says, “Sweet, there’s way more than I need for my class and I don’t have to write anything.  Thanks Mom”.  Ugg…

By the way, the second grader reported that afternoon that the fifth grader ate tons of Skittles on the way to school and wouldn’t share.  Breakfast of Champions…

We hope you enjoy our site and continue to use it as a resource for years to come.  We have been working for a little more than a year now to bring our dream to life.  We are two moms who wanted this tool and knew others would love to have it too.  It started one weekend when Elizabeth visited her mom in Roanoke, VA with her two monkeys and tried to find a day trip they would all enjoy.  She had an impossible time trying to piece together things from on line newspapers and weekly magazines. That weekend A Day’s Outing was born.

We have navigated through the high tech world of web design, database schemas, massive Excel documents, on line credit card payments, root access, Ruby on Rails, Linux, and we will never forget the endless stream of acronyms… SMO, MySQL, PHP, CPM, you name it.  We have laughed and laughed, felt sick to our stomachs and occasionally wanted to strangle someone.

So many people have stepped in to help us.  Carmen Hughes, our adviser, has continually been a resource to help with everything, anytime of the day, from editing to funding.  Chris, our ever-patient lead developer with his much appreciated laid back Caribbean attitude, has abilities that never seem to meet a wall that he can’t hurdle.  Karen West, our unbelievably talented artist, brings so much emotion to the site and has brought our sweet Floyd to life.   And last, but definitely not least, our friend Emily and the entire team at Electric Pulp, without them we would never have gotten to where we are today.  Not only did they read our mind and build an amazing site, they helped us continually to navigate the high tech world. Many thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick for helping us find them.

We’re now on our way. Please keep coming back and watch us grow. We are two girls with a dream that love to get out and go with our friends and family.  We can’t wait to be nationwide! **Cathy & Elizabeth