Paper Anniversary



This weekend we celebrated our paper anniversary. It is said that the paper anniversary symbolizes the delicate nature of a young marriage, as well as the modest beginnings of a new couple. I love old traditions and we both stuck with the paper theme for our gifts for each other.

My in-laws loves gifted us the use of their Napa house for the weekend. We are so lucky to have a family home in a place like Napa. Visiting Napa is on so many people's bucket lists, and people spend thousands of dollars to vacation to this place. Our second home. It's important to keep that in mind and not take such a beautiful blessing for granted.

We drove up after work on Friday and found the kitchen decorated with a banner and a bottle of champs in the fridge. God love my sweet in-laws. Seriously. They are so cute.

Nick made a couple pizzas and we spent the night relaxing and reminiscing. I found out Friday night that we would be waking up at 5:00 AM Saturday morning to go on a hot air balloon!

 

We woke up early Saturday to the sound of the pouring rain. A call to the balloon company confirmed that we would not, in fact be able to go that day. We went back to bed and woke up to more rain. We sat by the fire and talked about our wedding morning and what a complete disaster it would have been to have had rain that day. Our entire wedding was outside except for the bar and dance floor. We seriously would have been screwed if it had rained and I couldn't help but think about all of the poor brides that no doubt had weddings happening in the valley that day. We ended up going downtown to get a coffee at Oxbow, which was packed because of the rain. We left pretty quickly and went to a brewery to have a quick lunch and watch the A's game.{by the way... Wooooooooo!!! We won the West!! See you at the playoffs!}

 

Saturday night we went to one of my all time favorite restaurants, Michael Chiarello's, Bottega in Yountville. Dinner was absolutely to die for. We had frozen wedding cake to eat at home so we skipped desert, but loved these cute little peanut butter chocolates our server brought.

 

 

Sunday morning we woke up {at 5 AM} to go get on the balloon. This was an experience that I wish everyone could have at least once in their lives. Watching the sunrise from 3,000 feet above the vineyards was just breath taking. The balloon company that we went with launches the earliest and from the furthest North so we got to see all of the other balloons filling up and launching. At one point there were 16 other balloons in the air. Amazing.

 

We got married right on that golf course! To the left of the pond you can see a section of wedding chairs set up for another wedding.

 

Sunday was our actual anniversary and we flew directly over the golf course where we got married. Having to postpone the ride actually worked out better than we could have planned!

 

By the time we were done it was only 8:30 so we went to breakfast and then back home to watch our wedding video, do our gifts, and definitely take a nap. For my gift I made a shadow box frame with the lyrics from our wedding song. Nick gave me an empty journal with a message in it, promising to fill the journal with love letters and notes to me. I honestly couldn't think of a more perfect gift. This man just melts my heart.

 

 

My heart just feels so full of love after this weekend.



Wedding Wednesday - The Honeymoon

Next week we will be exactly one month away from celebrating our first anniversary! I'm pretty excited for our plans {a weekend in Napa, just the two of us} and I'm counting down the days.

In the mean time, I'm going to continue with recapping the different aspects of our wedding with Wedding Wednesday posts. I did a super quick overview of our wedding & honeymoon at the end of this post. Rookie mistake. Our honeymoon absolutely deserves it's own post. And it might be a long one.

When choosing where we were going to go we talked about the Canary Islands and Fiji, Tahiti and the Bahamas. The Bahamas ended up being completely out of the question since our September/October trip would fall smack in the middle of hurricane season. {No thank you!} So we actually didn't have a whole ton of options to choose from.
We then narrowed it down to Tahiti & Fiji, and then Tahiti since the flight was way shorter {although way more expensive}. There are a ton of islands that make up Tahiti and we chose Bora Bora. It's noted as one of the most romantic places on the entire planet and pretty much the only hotel rooms on the entire island are over the water bungalows. So, that made that decision easy.

We left the Tuesday morning after our wedding which was really nice. We had all day Sunday to spend with family by the pool, and Monday at home to re-organize, pack, and eat left over wedding cake in bed. The trip there was super easy. Just an hour flight from Oakland to LAX and layover and a few cocktails later we were on our way! We took a red eye out of LAX and flew all night, about 8 hours and landed in Papeete, Tahiti at sunrise. We had another quick layover that allowed us to get through customs and to change our clothes in the bathroom. It was super muggy and humid there and the entire airport is open air so there was no AC to be found. I was a hot mess and look a haggard makeup-less mess on all of the arrival photos. We had another quick flight on a propeller plane from Papeete to Bora Bora.

The airport in Bora Bora is on it's very own little airport island which was so cute. Our hotel sent us a boat to take us to the hotel. It was such a wonderful way to see the island for the first time. It was so surreal to see the water, the water! It's so blue. Like the bluest blue you can think of, and every shade of it. It was breathtaking really. We pulled up to the dock at our hotel and were greeted by a whole coconut and the cutest guy playing the ukulele. It was only 8AM by now and our room was no where near ready. We ate breakfast, which quickly became one of my favorite parts of the whole trip, and laid out on a private beach, just the two of us until our room was ready a few hours later.

Nick took the room researching very seriously and read every single review he could get his hands on. He made sure that we got the most private bungalow with the best view. The room was amazing. They had it set up for us with a bottle of champagne {and a couple martini glasses?} and a letter from the hotel manager congratulating us on our marriage. We settled in, showered away the airplane goo, drank the entire bottle of champagne and headed to dinner at the hotel restaurant.
This was when the fear set in. We hadn't researched the currency exchange at all, and had no idea what anything cost. Let me just say, ordering a glass of wine at dinner that said 1600 totally freaked me out. We paid for Wi-Fi the next morning and happily discovered that all you had to do was move the decimal and add about 50 US cents. Phew!

Sunrise

We fell into a pretty wonderful routine of sleeping in, swimming off of our own private deck, eating the most amazing breakfast every morning, drinking lots of great French wine and laying in the sun all day. We had the most amazing massages, ate a lot of amazing food, became obsessed with French Press coffee, got some pretty awesome tans, smoked some cigars, and swam with sharks and sting rays. Our tour guide may or may not have given me his phone number and asked me to call him. Um.... I'm on my honeymoon Sir... so.....

On our way to the spa

The food on the island is notoriously not great. Hotel food mostly with a few hits and misses depending on how adventurous we were feeling. We love food and really wanted to have some good foodie experiences to remember. We went one night to Villa Mahana which is a celeb favorite and a pretty famous restaurant among foodie travelers. There are only 10 tables in the entire restaurant and reservations generally aren't available unless you're looking about 8 months to a year out. Which we did luckily. The food was amazing. Devine. 

Lunch at Bloody Mary's. By far the worst bloody mary I've ever had.

The day before our trip came to and end, we packed up our love nest, caught a boat back to the airport and took a quick flight back to Tahiti for one night. We spent our last hours as honeymooners at a new hotel laying on the sand beach next the most beautiful infinity pool I've ever seen.
Our flight home left at 7:00AM and we had to leave the hotel pretty much in the middle of the night. We got home Thursday and had the rest of the weekend to readjust to the time change and enjoy being married until Monday came around and real life slapped us in the face.

I can't believe it's already almost been a year. It feels like we were just there, and I really hope some day we can go back. Looking back at all of these photos is making me so incredibly jealous of whoever is undoubtedly staying in our room.