A little over a year ago my dad sent us a Facebook link to the Huffington Post's "The Best Places for Coffee in Every State”. He claims that both spending money and drinking coffee is "what we both do best" and he definitely just added fuel to that fire when he shared the link. We both scrolled through the list as our twin telepathy sparked and in the words of Barney Stinson, we both thought, “Challenge Accepted!” Because nobody is as crazy as us when is comes to our coffee obsession and we wanted to be the judge of what they claimed was the best. Let us explain.
Our love affair with coffee shops is a result of many things:
Since Seattle is the biggest major city in the Northwest, it is a large influence on our region’s culture. The surrounding areas feed off of Seattle’s cool hipster vibes and sometimes try to recreate the same coffee culture as the birthplace of Starbucks. While our hometown only houses around 45,000 permanent residents, there are numerous coffee shops and stands in our city. Just “grabbing a coffee” has become a big part of everyone’s daily lives.
During our senior year of high school, after picking up our friend Jessica a few blocks down the road, we usually stopped for a cappuccino on our way to school. To-go cups turned into drinking it in the shop, then as the year progressed and our "senioritis" grew, being a couple minutes late ultimately turned into a complete absence to our first period class (sorry Mrs. Grossman!). We would usually be too busy discussing our current lives or future dreams to really even care that we were late anyways. Priorities, right? And still, years later, sitting at that coffee shop remains one of our favorite memories about our senior year of high school. It’s the place where our cherished friendships flourished and we grew closer to each other by sharing these memories.
As for our family, we have made it a daily habit to go out for coffee in the morning. Instead of going out for dinner, coffee shops are usually the places where we share our ideas, or maybe just sit in each other’s company. It all started when we were in 8th grade and took our first trip to Europe. Wifi was scarce and the only place you could usually find it was in coffee shops. We would take mid-day breaks, grab a cup of coffee, and rest our feet from the miles of sightseeing we did that morning. Now we’ve found our morning coffee shop ritual an important tradition when we are all in town.
As soon as we read this article, we made a commitment to ourselves to visit every single coffee shop on the list. We recognized it may take a while, but it turned into one of those “bucket list” things. The next day we traveled an hour up to Asheville, North Carolina to cross it off the list. Then the day after down to Columbia, South Carolina. We started this blog after we had already visited many of the shops so we have some catching up to do to, but here is a running list of the places we have gone.
50 coffee shop list
Georgia
Virginia
Washington DC
Washington
Delaware
Pennsylvania
Idaho