Once every 3 months or so Luke and I take a weekend day trip up to Rochester, NY. It is our closest big city. The first fews time we drove up just to explore and find out what shopping/food options were available. Now we have made it a routine to stop at two specific areas:

First up is Pittsford Plaza. This mall area has several stores we like to go to including the original (and nicest) Wegmans, a two story Barnes and Nobles, a movie theatre, our closest Cheesecake Factory, and Trader Joes. We usually stop in Barnes and Nobles to get Starbucks in the Cafe and pursue some books.

We rarely actually buy books but as bookstores in general are disappearing we enjoy being able to  flip through a book before buying it for cheap online at Amazon. Awhile back we were looking at homemade beer recipe books (see Bottling our first homemade brew). This time around with a Christmas gift card in hand we perused the international cooking area. Taking pictures of the book info for Sushi, Curry Crockpot recipes, and a Korean Cook Book we ended up only buying me a new journal. But we left with ideas for birthday present books. 🙂

Our next stop was Trader Joes. Growing up in SoCal Trader Joes were common and many. In fact my grandfather owned a dry cleaning business across the street from the original Trader Joes in South Pasadena. Trader Joes just has certain products (at certain prices) we can’t get anywhere else; so we stock up. This time around we walked away with frozen swordfish steaks, ginger snaps, crackers, and  a whole lot of coffee.  We enjoyed samples of cheese, vegi chili with corn chips, and I had a caffeine boost of sample size cup of their dark roast coffee.

The second normal stop is a suburb of Rochester: Henrietta. Here is the closest Red Robin, Melting Pot, Play it Again sports (where we ended up getting my snowshoes), and several international restaurants and grocery stores. In Henrietta we usually stop at the Korean food market to pick up frozen beef for eating Korean BBQ at home along with a big container of Kimchee and rice pasta. In the same shopping center is also a nice game store Millennium games. We tend to stop in there to see what is new and double check any sales. When all our shopping is through we go get dinner at Red Robin, Sticky Lips (see Kayaking and BBQ) or most often Seoul Garden: for Korean BBQ.

On the long drive back and forth we enjoy singing along to CDs, trying to find a decent radio station, looking out the window, and just talking-about anything. Sometimes it’s nice to have a long drive to bring up topics that don’t have to have distinct starting or ending places; just sharing thoughts.

In the end we get home tired but happy with our half date half errand day in Rochester. How about you? What date/errand routines do you keep?