Wedding time

Happy Monday.

I’m actually off of work today – the hubby and I took a 3 day weekend – because one of my good friends got married in North New Jersey yesterday. It was my first time being a bridesmaid and it was a fun but long day. Lets go back to Friday though.

We left right after work on Friday night, and made the four hour drive to the hotel. The hotel was a gorgeous Mariott with super comfy beds. We fell asleep ASAP.

Saturday morning I headed to the country club where the ceremony and reception were held to do a quick rehearsal of the ceremony. The hubby stayed at the hotel and went to their gym and pool while I was gone. As soon as I got back to the hotel I went down to the gym and did a 30 minute incline & interval workout and then did 15 minutes on the bike. It felt great to get in a good sweat in the middle of a crazy busy weekend away. Lunch was an amazing avacado, lettuce and provalone sandwich from Atlanta Bread Company. It was awesome. Dinner that night was the rehearsal dinner. I ate lots of the amazingly spiced potatoes and steamed veggies. They also had some pasta with vodka sauce and wine.

Sunday was the big day! I went to my friends hotel suite at 8:30am to start getting ready with her and her sister. The hubby brought me an egg and cheese bagel sandwich and an iced coffee for breakfast. I’m not a huge coffee drinker, but I definitly needed it Sunday morning.  When I do drink coffee, I always get it iced, with skim milk and sugar. We spent about four hours getting hair and makeup done and got to the country club to take a few hours of photos. At 4:30pm the ceremony started, and it went super smoothly. The cocktail hour had a TON of food. It was the largest buffet I’ve ever seen. And since we got photos before the ceremony, the bride, groom and the bridal party got to enjoy it. It was so good! After cocktail hour, we were introduced and dinner was served. The hubby and I ordered baked eggplant parm. It was good – it tasted like baked lasagne. After the main course came the real show. Belly Dancers!

It was super entertaining. I loved when they balanced the candles on their head!

Then came the crazy desserts… starting with baked alaska!I’d never had baked alaska before but it was pretty good! I loved the “blackened” flavor. It was like a toasted marshmellow. 🙂

They had tables of cookies, gelato, wedding cake, chocolate fondue and dippers, etc. It was insane. Luckily I managed to save room for some sweets! haha.

After dessert, the waiters started bringing around comfort food – oven baked pizza and fried mac and cheese. It. was. nuts. The food was never ending!

This morning the hubby and I woke up at 6am to get in the road. We got home around 10. So we’ve been hanging out most of the day, I’m taking care of laundry and ran to the grocery store to stock up for the week. I’m hoping to get a run in here soon. It’s been a good way to spend our monday. 🙂

Anniversary Celebrations Part Two

After a night of Seinfeld, cake and packing, (read about our anniversary celebrations part one) we woke up early (4:30am!) to get to the airport and security for our 6:00am flight (it’s a small airport).

By 12:45pm, we were lying pool side sipping pina coladas. 🙂

The rest of our week consisted of eating, walking along the beach and lots of hammocking.

I caught a gorgeous sunset one evening while out for a walk:We had a free cake delivered to our room in honor of our anniversary. It was covered in fondant, which I ate off of the entire cake because it was so good.

Notable eats included awesomely seasoned veggies wrapped up and topped with two eggs at the Spanish restaurant.And red, yellow and green tortilla chips (with amazing salsa and guac) at the Mexican restaurant.Lots of these guys were roaming around the resort:

We played the coolest, most jungle-y mini golf ever.And even went to the gym most mornings for about 30 minutes. The gym was awesome, the weight area was open air with no walls, and the cardio area had floor to ceiling windows.The hubby had some super fresh coconut milk.On the Thursday we were there (day 5) the weather started getting much windier, and we heard Tropical Storm Rina was going to make an appearance. They prepped the resort for the rain and winds. They closed the storm doors on all of the balconies in the guests’ rooms.And boarded up the ocean front shops.The waves got rough too.We had to stay in our room for part of the day for our own safety. We went to bed with to the sound of thunder. It really didn’t seem to get too bad. The next morning the sky and ocean cleared and luckily we were able to enjoy our last day there out at the pool.

Unfortunately, getting home on that Saturday was a mess. It was snowing in the north east which caused a turbulent first flight to Philly. And then our flight from Philly to home got completely canceled. So we got a rental and drove home – it took almost double the time it should have – and the roads were a mess for most of it.

Not a fun way to end our anniversary trip. But luckily we have the memories from the first part of the trip!!

Anniversary Celebrations Part One

The night before we left for Mexico to celebrate our anniversary we had a few other exciting activities planned.

Coincidentally Jerry Seinfeld was coming to town that evening. The hubby is a huge fan of his and has been his whole life, so when tickets went on sale in September we jumped to get them. I really like Jerry’s sense of humor -he keeps it clean and doesn’t pick up race, gender or minorities, and he jokes about things that I think everyone thinks about at some time in their life. My favorite joke was “marriage is like a chess game where the board is floating on water, the pieces disappear and the moves you make don’t matter”.

It was a good show and pretty surreal to see him in person. He even did a Q&A session at the end where people asked whatever they felt like asking. This was a really neat idea and not something I’ve seen many comedians do.

After getting home from the show we dug into our last piece of wedding cake. We only saved one piece from the top tier because we knew it wouldn’t taste too great and we wanted to enjoy it when we got back from the honeymoon.

Here’s a picture of our wedding cake.

Our slice tasted very moist and we actually ate it all. The frosting had lost a little bit of its sweetness. And the bite of purple fondant tasted good as new. I’m a big fondant fan. 🙂

After eating our cake we double checked our luggage and hit the hay for an early wake up call to the airport with Mexico as our final destination.