Fashion, Travel & Lifestyle Blog || Est. 2012 || Virginia Beach, VA
My first bridal shower was held a few weeks ago on July 7th, while Ryan and I were visiting my parents in Maine. My mom threw me a lovely and intimate tea party themed bridal shower, with the help of my high school best friend / matron-of-honor Julia! I'm excited to recap the shower here today for Wedding Wednesday.
In April, I got to check a travel item off from my current 101 in 1001 list: visiting the state of Delaware! Until recently, it was the only East Coast state that I'd never been to. (Note: my definition of "visiting a state" is spending a night there, not just driving or flying through.) When my dad and I used to make our twice annual road trips from my hometown in Maine to Charlotte, NC for my college, we somehow never took routes that lead us through Delaware. It's been on my list of places to visit for quite awhile, but I never would've imagined how I'd finally get to Delaware. I finally got to visit Delaware during my "funemployment road trip" to Maine this spring, which I did shortly after losing my radio job in April.
Post-college, I have always flown home to Maine for convenience. But since I was going to be visiting home for a longer period of time, I knew that I needed my car. And that meant making the 11 hour drive from Virginia Beach to my hometown! I knew that 11 hours was too long for me to be in the car alone all in one day. I told my parents that I had selected Wilmington, DE as my overnight stop for the drive to Maine. It ended up being my stop on the road trip back to Virginia, too! So I got to spend two nights total in Delaware.
I stayed at hotels in different parts of Wilmington on each leg of the trip, but neither of them were the downtown. I would still like to return to Wilmington someday and see that part of the city, as I hear it does have some nice attractions. But despite skipping downtown on these trips, there were two spots I visited in Wilmington that I think are worth sharing about with you here on my blog! The first? Winterthur Museum Garden & Library.
Today's Wedding Wednesday post has been a much requested topic from some of the Instagram Q&A boxes that I've done the last few months! I've been looking forward to sharing the details with you of how I asked my bridal party to be in the wedding.
Puerto Rico is 100% one of my favorite warm weather travel destinations. I was lucky enough to visit two years apart in 2022 and 2024! I fell in love with Puerto Rico and the charm of San Juan during my first trip, and my second trip just deepened those feelings. San Juan is the capital and largest city in Puerto Rico. PR is a US territory so there is no passport required to visit, and no time change if you're coming from the East Coast! Win win!! I'm excited to update my first San Juan Travel Guide from my 2022 trip, and to now be able to share the best recommendations from my 2022 and 2024 trips!
On Saturday May 11th, Ryan's parents threw us the most amazing engagement party at their beautiful home!! I'm so excited to share the details with you for this week's Wedding Wednesday post. I am also such a firm believer now that every engaged couple should have an engagement party! If you need convincing, hopefully today's post will help. 😉
The majority of our wedding guests will be visiting Virginia Beach from out-of-town for our wedding. A good chunk are from other parts of Virginia or North Carolina and will have to drive a few hours, and another large amount are from further destinations and will be flying in. Since we have so many traveling guests, it was important to me to provide a good variety of lodging options on our wedding website. In addition to a few traditional hotel room blocks, I also wanted to give guests a short-term rental option as well. For some groups traveling to our wedding, their lodging preferences would probably align more with a nice house rental for their whole group, rather than multiple separate hotel rooms (without having shared communal gathering space).
Enter my favorite local short-term rental company: Transcendent Stays! You might remember that I did a lovely off-season staycation at a Transcendent Stays property with my friend Caroline this winter. Transcendent Stays operates a variety of luxury short-term rental homes, apartments, and boutique inn style rooms in Virginia Beach. Many of their properties are just a block or two away from the beach as well.
I recently went to tour some Transcendent Stays properties with their team, so that I could provide the best recommendations for our wedding guests on lodging options. I'm excited to tell you more about them:
This is a Wedding Wednesday post that I've been very excited to share!! We took our engagement photos in mid-March, but I have waited share them on the internet until our guests had received our save-the-dates in the mail. I feel like there are so few things these days that are truly a surprise, and I wanted our guests to have the magic of seeing our engagement photos for the first time when they arrived in their mailbox. I have no regrets on that, and would recommend to any other brides-to-be as well. 😊
Without further ado, here are our photos!! Our wedding photographers are Jake and Jennifer Vinluan from Vinluan Photography, who are based in Virginia Beach. Jenn is the one who did our engagement photos!
I can't believe I'm 18 months into my current 101 in 1001 list! There's been some great list items that I've been able to cross off in the last six months that I am so excited to recap today. The 101 in 1001 is a type of bucket list created by blogger Mackenzie Horan from Design Darling. You try to hit 101 goals in various categories of your choosing in 1001 days! I'm now on my second 101 in 1001 list, and love doing these.
I've shared before on my blog and Instagram that Ryan and I first connected by matching on the dating app Hinge in February 2022. But I never took the time to share our full story with more details. I thought this would be fun to do for today's Wedding Wednesday post!
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| May 1st 2022 |
In January, I got to take Ryan to visit my favorite city for the first time! It was a very quick trip, and I feel like I never have enough time to see all of my friends or do everything I miss doing in Charlotte. But we did knock out several fun things, and Ryan got to meet four of my Charlotte girlfriends and some of their significant others!! So, I'll still count the weekend as a win for our first Charlotte experience together!
Here's a little recap of what we did during the weekend:
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to do a wonderful weekend staycation here in Virginia Beach. Local property management group Transcendent Stays invited me to stay at one of their fantastic local short-term rental properties. I am usually Team Hotel over Team Short-Term Rental for my travels both near and far (with exceptions to that rule on occasion), but I had such a phenomenally positive experience with this staycation that it was a good reminder for me to consider these types of properties more often when traveling out of the area or doing a staycation! I can't wait to tell you more about it today.
Over the past few years, I've found Target to be more hit-or-miss for me when it comes to clothing, but I swear that their women's shoe selection keeps getting better and better every year! I wanted to get up a quick post to share a few of my new favorite styles (all under $50!).
I usually try to get my Word of the Year post published before the end of January each year, but it totally escaped my mind this year since the first month of this year was so busy with wedding planning. But better late than never, right? 😊 I am really excited about my 2024 Word of the Year. This year's is such a good fit for my current life stage, and it also has such a positive connotation attached to it. I'm also sharing a few photos of one of my favorite casual winter outfits!
Welcome back to Wedding Wednesday!! We are officially nine months out from our wedding month... November 2024! (Yes, this spring and summer lover is going to be a late fall bride! Who would've thought?!) I thought it would be fun today to share a little checklist of things I've done so far and things that I'm hoping to do between now and the six-month mark. We got engaged less than a week before Thanksgiving 2023, so with the craziness of the holiday season I didn't really start wedding planning until after New Years. But we sure got a lot done in January, which I feel really good about. I'm excited to share my first wedding planning checklist here on the blog today!
I recently tried a high-end skincare retinol system that worked incredibly well for my skin! I shared a little bit about it on Instagram Stories and got so many questions about it, so I wanted to write up a quick blog post with more information.
If you had told me a week ago that today I'd be sharing this insane story of how I got my wedding dress, I would not have believed you! I wasn't planning to dress shop until late February. I had actually just made a few appointments at local dress shops and was planning to schedule a couple more this week. But plot twist- I found my dress by total surprise this past Sunday in an incredibly lucky way!! Here's the full story:
I read 42 books in 2023, and it's time to recap my absolute favorite reads. For several years now, I have done a recap post sharing only the very best books of the year. I give out five-star book ratings on Goodreads pretty sparingly, so you know that if one of these books is featured in today's post that I truly loved it. I had four novels, and three non-fiction books make the cut this year! One book was a re-read from a few years ago, the rest were all new to me.
Time for my next Wedding Wednesday post! I already know that this whole series is going to be so much fun to write and document over the next year or two. The biggest question that I feel like a couple gets when starting to plan a wedding is "Where do you want the wedding to be?" Will the wedding be local to where the bride and groom currently live, in the bride or groom's home city, or a domestic or international destination wedding? All of those options have their own pros and cons of course. And the estimated wedding budget definitely plays a huge roll in figuring out which option would be best. Ready to find out where Ryan and I are planning to get married?
My favorite way to start off a new year is with news about the winter edition of the Lilly Pulitzer Sunshine Sale! I am more excited than normal for this Lilly sale. Why? Because I will be on the hunt for all things wedding! White things to wear for our engagement party or my bridal shower, a cute piece or two to wear for engagement photos, and dresses to wear for friends' upcoming weddings. Bring on the shopping! 😀
