16 Breweries in 15 days!

That sounds kind of excessive, huh?  Luckily, I’m a smart girl and I know how to do these things without hurting myself.

In fact, I wrote a post over at Fitfluential about how to incorporate craft beer into a fit life.  Go. Read it.  Learn from it.

Now I can tell you about our trip.

When we go on family vacations, we don’t normally eat out for every meal.  We try very hard to rent accommodations that allow us to cook a lot of meals at home.  And this vacation was no exception, except we did end up eating out about once every day, thanks to the Bend Visitors Center.  (Thank you VRBO for some awesome rental houses over the last 6 years.  I’m happy to talk more about this later if anyone is interested, but this post is about beer.  Good beer.)

However, a challenge awaited us in Bend and I am not one to walk away from a challenge.

The first few days of our travels took us to the TriCities area of Washington.  Our first brewpub netted us dinner the first night after a long day of traveling.  Beer Geek couldn’t resist the siren call of another brewpub the next night for dinner, where I had one of the best smoked porter’s I’ve ever had, as well as quite possibly the most amazing salad I’ve tasted – a bacon/shrimp/spinach salad with a bacon tomato vinaigrette.  Oh my!  (Yes, this is why I say even non-beer drinkers should go to brewpubs. )  The next day we met one of Beer Geek’s friends at, you guessed it, another brewpub.

3 Brewpubs, 3 days and we hadn’t even hit Bend yet!

And then the challenge began.  See Bend is a smart town.  They have this little challenge called the Bend Ale Trail.  If you hit all 9 Bend breweries/pubs, you get this really cool pint “glass” made out of silocone.  And if you hit the “extra” pub up in Sisters, you get a patch.  I run for bling, of course I’m going to drink for bling!  Yes, yes I did!

 Lest you think that’s the end of the story, that’s only 13 brewpubs. Yes,  we did manage to hit 3 more brewpubs.  (Actually Beer Geek even managed to hit a 4th on our very last full day, but I stayed at our friend’s house instead of joining him.)

So, how did I manage to hit this many breweries without gaining weight or spending my vacation hung over?

1.  I split a sampler with Beer Geek most of the time, which very seldom equaled more than a beer each and sometimes a lot less.
2.  I ate healthy meals at the majority of the restaurants (yes, there may have been one instance of calamari and another meal that included a jalapeno cheese dip).  Most of the time I ate a salad or replaced a starchy/fatty side with veggies.
3.  I hiked up and down mountains, white water rafted, and ran two races.

All in all, I felt very much like I managed to mix my love of craft beer quite successfully with a fun and healthy vacation.

Wondering where I went?  Ice Harbor Brewing, Rattlesnake Mountain Brewing, Mill Creek Brew Pub, The Bend Ale Trail, Sun River Brewing, Laurelwood Brewery, and Fort George Brewery.