Bridesmaids Dresses

I went to Chicago last weekend (United fixed their glitch, I was a nobody in Zone 5 :( ) to do some bridesmaids dress shopping and see some of my favorite people!  Alyssa and Shelby live in Chicago and two of the stores I've wanted to go to are located there so it seemed like the perfect place to do the shopping.  Whitney flew in from Columbus and unfortunately Lindsay's flight was cancelled due to the winter storm Nemo (over 2 feet of snow in the NE - Yikes!).  

I got in Friday night and met Whitney at Rock Bottom for a drink.  I can never go straight to bed after traveling! We stayed at the Courtyard River North which was a great location! I just searched for Marriott hotels that we could get a discount at and this one popped up - it couldn't have worked out better!

Saturday morning Shelby had the 3 of us over for brunch and mimosas at her apartment in River North.  She lives a few blocks from Michigan Ave and the stores we were going to so it was a good meeting place.  It was decorated so cute!

We went to J.Crew for our first appointment and I knew I would like the dresses. I've seen them in person at other weddings and I have always liked the silk chiffon styles I see online.  Since they only have 8 styles in silk chiffon, the three girls rotated trying those styles on.

We left the store an hour later with our eyes set on the v-neck short Louisa dress and the long Arabella dress.  

Our next appointment was at Bella Bridesmaid (they have stores all over the US but each one is owned individually and the designers they carry at each location vary).  Whitney and Alyssa had been here before for bridesmaids shopping so they knew the drill.  We ended up finding the final dress here! It's a long, navy, silk chiffon strapless gown by Love Lane.  They only had it in green in the store - which was beautiful on all the girls as well!  We need to get all the dresses ordered by the beginning of March to guarantee a July delivery.  Seems a bit crazy to me! 

Whitney and I decided to continue shopping down Michigan Ave after lunch.  Neither of us had been shopping on the tourist filled street in years - we usually avoid it.  Patagonia was having a sale so I picked up a wine colored fleece for 40% off.  I also found a necklace to wear with my LBD next weekend for Eric and Orchid's engagement party in Michigan.  Such a steal from Francesca's!

We went to Quartino for dinner that night (which was conveniently 4 blocks from the hotel, although we planned dinner way before accommodations were booked!).  This must be the place to be on Saturday nights! There were so many people when we walked in - thankfully we made reservations.  Whitney and I immediately felt like we were in Marcella's (a Michael Cameron restaurant in Columbus).  The menus, plates, kitchen, tables, i.e everything looked the exact same.  We knew it was strange when we went to the bathroom and saw they had the same exact bathtub style sinks and powdered soap - who else has powdered soap?  We asked the staff and they said Marcella's came in and took pictures of Quartino to base Marcella's off of! Sad to hear Marcella's was the original, although I still love it.

Successful weekend in Chicago, amazing to be with some of my closest friends (sad we missed Linds) and checked something else off the wedding checklist!

Super Bowl Weekend

Colorado has seen very little snow in the last month.  December was a good month for snow, but we were out of town for most of it. We had a great ski day after the holidays in December, which happened to be the day the Panoramic Chairlift opened (not planned at all on our part).  We bought the Winter Park 4 pack this year - I think it was $169 but it was around $139 when it first went on sale.  That's an awesome deal for 4 days of skiing considering lift tickets are $100+.

We planned on going to Winter Park last Saturday with some friends who also have the WP pass.  We woke up Saturday morning at 5:30 am to see they got 6 inches.  That meant we were in for a great day of skiing!  We parked at Mary Jane and the lot was full right after we pulled in at 8:15.   We went straight over to the Panoramic Chair (the snow there is awesome) and started our day on blue/blacks in calf deep powder. Great start to the day but it didn't take long for our legs to start hurting!!

It was snowing over Berthound pass and the sun was shining on the upper half of Winter Park - this made for some awesome pictures!

Sunday was the Superbowl: Ravens vs. 49ers.  I can't say I really cared who won, I was more interested in Matt's office pool where we could win money.  Of course Matt needed the score to be Ravens 34 to 49ers 29 - which was the score. Until the last 2 minutes of the game when the Ravens gave up two points.  We could have won $200, so I was sad.

Carrie and I made Super Bowl themed cupcakes (6 sticks of butter later, yuck).  We kindly asked that everybody refrained from eating the dessert until after half time so we could enjoy our masterpiece :) Everything was edible - including the goal posts (but now what do I do with 12 packs of pocky sticks...).  I decided after this handwork I will take a break from baking - it took nearly 4 hours to make between the two of us!

Honeymoon Booked!

In the last post, I mentioned we're kind of obsessed with getting airline miles.  I've done a lot of research on the "art" of booking trips with airline miles and how to get the best bang for your buck (or bang for your miles?) so I was prepared on how we should approach our honeymoon flights.

Before we got engaged we had talked about where we might want to go for our honeymoon - I had always dreamed of Santorini and Matt always dreamed of Hawaii. I quickly realized that although my dream destination is the Greek Islands, it's pretty far and inconvenient from Denver. It would be a flight from Denver to the East Coast, then to Athens, then to Santorini.  18 hours of traveling seemed like a bit much considering we don't have many vacation days to allow for the jet lag and relaxation.  Hawaii it was.  Hawaii is pretty easy to get to from Denver and it's only 4 hours behind us.  Much more manageable than 9 hours ahead of us in Greece.

When we got engaged in September, I immediately looked at flights to Hawaii. I saw they didn't go on sale until 11 months prior to the departure date.  We realized we couldn't do a honeymoon right after our wedding because at the time, Matt was in a role that required long hours in Aug/Sep for budget season.  It would have been to hard to take two weeks off for the wedding and the honeymoon. We ultimately decided on  the second week of October, four weeks after our wedding.  

I called US Airways and United many times and we finally booked two first class tickets to Hawaii!  The first class flights were 70K miles per person - which was actually less miles than economy seats because we did it so far in advance.  Good thing we're both planners!

We looked around at so many hotels and reached out to friends to see where they recommended staying.  We ultimately decided on Coastline Cottages in Poipu.  It's not a resort or a hotel.  It's our own private home on the ocean.  We opted for this for many reasons, but the TripAdvisor reviews sold  me (I plan most of trips based on TripAdvisor reviews).

We're pretty excited.

8 months from now we'll be taking in views like this:

Obsessed with Airline Miles

Four years ago I worked for a company that had global HQ in Zurich, Switzerland.  Yes, this was a huge perk.  And probably the only perk of the job.  Anyway, I traveled to Zurich, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, France and the UK in 6 different trips over an 8 month time period in 2010.  Needless to say, I was never home.  It was pretty amazing how it worked out since Matt was living/working in Luxembourg at his company European HQ for 10 months.  We saw each other more often in Europe than we did in Ohio (he was living in Cleveland, I was living in Columbus).

Due to all these trips, I made sure to fly the same family of airlines (Star Alliance) so I could get tons of miles.  By the end of the year I had 49,500 miles.  500 miles short of Gold status. If you don't know what Gold status is on an airline, it's pretty much the bomb. Premier Check-In, Free Checked bags (2), Premier security line, Premier Boarding, additional bonus miles, free upgrades, etc.  So I was VERY unhappy that I was so close to getting Gold status but was 500 miles short.  Mid January 2011 I received an email saying they automatically bumped me to Gold - yahoo! Unfortunately I didn't travel as much as I had hoped in 2011 so I didn't get to take advantage of it as much as I would have liked to, but it was still very exciting (except that United had some glitch and thought I was Gold status until.. well they still think I am.. Oops! :) ).

The best time we had with Gold status was our Costa Rica trip in May 2012.  We flew United from DEN-IAH-SJO.  We had a two hour layover in Houston and were hoping to get into the United Lounge.  As I just mentioned, United thinks I'm still "Star Gold" status (side note: I'm flying United tomorrow, crossing my finger they still have a glitch in their system).  The status definitely was up in February 2012, but for some reason every time I've flown Untied since then, "Star Gold" is printed on my boarding pass.  Please, don't tell them. I like cutting the security line.  

I have a "Star Gold" card, but it has the expiration date on it so I didn't bother to bring it on our trip to CR.  We walked into the United Lounge and I handed over my boarding pass and said we would like to enter the lounge.  They checked to make sure Gold Status was on our boarding passes and voila - we were in!  We rode the escalator up to the lounge and were greeted with free newspapers and a very friendly environment.  We immediately found our way over to the bar area and started enjoying their complimentary selection of beer, wine, and munchies (pretzels, trail mix, cheese, etc.).  It was the perfect way to start our trip to Costa Rica!

Once I realized I had 50K miles with Star Alliance in 2010, it hit me that I needed to save all the miles for our honeymoon! I opened up a credit card that had 35K bonus miles and additional miles for every transaction.  By the time we got engaged, I had nearly 140K miles with US Airways.

This really helped us with our honeymoon planning!

Wedding Update

I'm pretty long overdue (okay 3 months) for a post.  Most of my time is consumed with wedding planning and it's  been tricky doing it from 1200 miles away.  We have several items checked off our list, although the list seems never ending!

The venue and the church were taken care of right away since we flew back to Detroit two weeks after we got engaged last September. Since then, we've booked the photographer, DJ, hotel blocks, created a website, looked at invitations, ordered my wedding dress and ordered the grooms suit.  The groomsmen's suits are in the process of being ordered and I'm going to Chicago this weekend to look at bridesmaids dresses!  So, it's been busy.

We picked out invitations at a local store but we're trying to see if we can make the other paper products ourselves.  Unfortunately Paper Source does not make paper that is a size our printer supports, so we're hoping to somehow trick the printer and get this to print.  We already have some great templates and fonts we want to use, just needto figure out this last piece!  If we can figure this out, we will probably try to print our own Save the Dates.  You could say I'm a little bit of a control freak - yes it is more cost effective to print our own paper products but it also seems much more fun to me to be hands on!

This weekend I'm meeting some of my bridesmaids in Chicago (two of them live there) to do some bridesmaids dress hunting!  We're going to J.Crew, Bella Bridesmaid and Nordstrom.  I know they will be navy dresses (the guys are wearing grey suits with a navy tie), but I'm not sure what else we will be looking for.  There are a few J.Crew dresses I absolutely love but for some reason whenever I see their clothes in person and on my body they never seem as cute.  So I don't want to get my hopes up!

Crossing my fingers the big storm on the East Coast won't impact travel plans for this weekend!