Vegan day trip to Beacon, New York

Written by Nature, Recipes / Food, Tania, Video

Tania was trying to convince me this morning to go fruit picking somewhere upstate, but I managed to talk her out of it. We settled on heading to Beacon NY instead. We began our day making cajun sweet potato fries. This has become one of my favorite vegan home cooked meals since we adopted the vegan lifestyle about a week ago. After breakfast we began our drive upstate.

Before leaving the city, we decided to top off our stomachs with some vegan, gluten-free burgers from Pure Ktchn in Midtown Manhattan. We recently stumbled upon this spot and it has quite quickly become a favorite. Their vegan burger is delish! When we tried it first on Monday, we had them with chips, but I think they ran out and served us a fresh tasty salad instead (hoping we wouldn’t notice). To be honest, I think Tania and I preferred the salad instead anyway. We might ask for it next time. The restaurant is located on 46th street between 8th and 9th avenue. We love the restaurant! It appeared to be a small family run food joint. I don’t miss beef burgers one bit. Tania and I just need to figure out how to make them.

After our meal we got back into the car and headed north towards Beacon. Tania really wanted to take the Taconic State Parkway for its scenery.

Just as we arrived I thought we could try some vegan treats. We stopped by Ella’s Bellas in Beacon to grab a vegan muffin, brownie, oatmeal cookie and coffee. We took our snacks to Scenic Hudson’s Long Dock Park to enjoy. Our original plan was to catch up on some reading (work/school related) but we ended up hiking south (towards Denning Point) instead. On our way there we found a spot to tan. I took a picture of the clouds and took this timelapse:

Looking back at it, I never thought it was possible for clouds to travel in layers. Seems like they were traveling perpendicular to each other. We increased our tan and continued walking north were we stumbled upon this dear:

Then came this abandoned warehouse. While I was busy snapping pictures Tania was collecting flowers to take back home. In case we were stopped and asked about the flowers we were smuggling out of the park I took this video as proof that it was Tania’s idea:

Before heading back to NY we thought we should get one “meal” in. We decided it would be refreshing to drink down some freshly squeezed juice after our long hike along the Hudson river. We searched for smoothies and stumbled upon an interesting spot in Peekskill. Tania and I love Peekskill as evident by all the posts I have from there. If this spot was good, Tania and I would probably stop by on every visit :-). The spot is called PK Blendz and is run by a really nice guy (Robert Scott). He was genuinely nice and wouldn’t let us leave until we told him what we thought of his freshly squeezed juices. Robert suggested we play connect 4 while he prepared the juices. The juices were so good! We definitely will visit if we drive by in the future. I had the Energizer (apples, carrots, celery, ginger, lemon, pears, and turmeric) while Tania enjoyed the Bone Builder (orange, apple, celery, and lemon).

I feel great. I am surprised we were able to last without eating any animal based products. It actually wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, and I feel much healthier!