How Sip & Stroll Works

The goal of reimagining First Friday is to celebrate the creativity and vibrancy in downtown Fredericksburg. Our downtown is vital to the Fredericksburg region as a whole. So as a community we want to come together and celebrate what’s already here and do what we can to just make it even better and help it grow.

Over the years, First Friday has always been a thing in downtown Fredericksburg for the art galleries and the art community. They typically have their show openings on the First Friday of the month and they run that through the entire month. We want to take that idea that’s already been established for First Fridays and use that to help the economy and make the community brighter. Bring in galleries, retail, restaurants, non-profits, all the different things that make this community so amazing.

The Sip and Stroll element is meant to facilitate movement throughout town. Each month, you’re going to get a map that shows the list of participating restaurants and the exact boundaries of where you can sip and stroll, where you can have your beverage from that participating restaurant and actually walk with it throughout downtown while you shop, while you visit galleries, while you do all the things that downtown has to offer.

You’ll first come downtown. You’ll go to whatever restaurant you want that’s on that list. You get your cup. You’ll get a wristband so that everyone can identify that you have purchased a Sip and Stroll beverage. You’ll get your drink. It’s going to be in a specific cup with a logo on it from the restaurant that you picked it up from and then you can walk around as long as you stay within the boundaries which will be clearly marked with signs sandwich boards and trash cans for you to dispose of your cups.

When you go to another restaurant, you will have to dispose of that original cup and get a new one from that restaurant with their logo on it, but you can continue to walk around from 5pm to 9pm, with last call being at 8:30. So, as long as everything is discarded by nine, we’re good to go.

We are incredibly excited to be able to bring this to Fredericksburg. It’s a brand new thing. It is a relatively new ABC license that was introduced and we in Fredericksburg are the first in our region to try to attempt an event of this type at this scale. So it’s incredibly important that the community comes together and is responsible and takes part in making sure that this event is a success. We cannot do it without the help of the community as a whole come paint the town with us.