One Year Anniversary

As I mentioned yesterday, Steve and I just celebrated our 1 year anniversary together. It was such an amazing time that I thought I would share it with all of you. Enjoy the story, enjoy the pictures, and feel free to steal some ideas if you so wish :)

First of all, Steve planned our entire weekend! I kept bugging him about what we were going to do, but he just assured me he had it under control and would reveal it in due time. Well, the weekend of my birthday (July 28th) we were celebrating, and that was when he revealed the plan to me. He did it in such a cool way that was just the beginning of what the weekend would be. He brought out this object covered with a blanket. He handed me a piece of paper rolled up and tied with ribbon. As I opened up the scroll, it had pictures on it that I had to piece together to figure out what we were doing. The mysterious blanketed item was a box with 2 bottles of champagne in it - he had signed us up as members of the #1 winery in the state of California, and this was the first shipment that we got. Plus, we were going to be staying there. You will see what all that pictogram revealed below.

Since Steve had planned out the whole weekend, I thought it was only fair that I did something special for him. So, I took some construction paper, cut it up into all different squares with different little cut outs here and there, and on each one wrote something I love about Steve. I created a trail with them from the front door the our bedroom. On the front door I wrote on a full sheet of construction paper "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..." Since it was going to be late, and I only had the place illuminated with candles, I put a flashlight on the door know for him to use and read each of them. At the end of the trail was a jar I had taken and put various stickers on that said things like: "You and me," "You are wonderful," etc. This way he could collect all those notes and put them in his jar for any time he needed to know how much I love him. Also at the end of the trail was a gift and a note. Anyway, he came home (I hid in the bathroom), followed the trail, and read the note, and then I came out to tell him how much I love him. He opened the gift, which was a frame with 3 slots - I put a wedding picture in one, his vows to me in another, and my vows to him in another, so we can always look at our vows and reflect on that commitment we made to one another.

Saturday morning we awakened at 3:00 to head out to Temecula for a sunrise hot air balloon ride! When we got to the rendezvous point, it was a winery called La Cereza. There they had some breakfast nibbles for us and coffee while we waited for the other people in the group. We then piled into a couple of cars where we were taken out to the launching point. There we saw 2 hot air balloons laying out their sides about to be blown up. That part was way cooler than we expected. They were huge, and it was a cool thing to watch them get blown up. At one point they let us walk inside the balloon and have our picture taken inside the balloon. As they got it all ready, and it stood upright, they took pictures of us, had put up a banner that said "Happy Anniversary," and we hopped in. They had champagne and breakfast for us in the balloon, and played music for us as we took off. It was the most incredible thing! We flew over all the beautiful vineyards and hit an altitude at one point of 5,500 feet! It was so beautiful and ridiculously cool. Our pilot was super nice and fun. We were up there for an hour floating around - enjoying the view, each other, and all the pilot telling us what was what. After our hour was up, we literally just slowly descended until we landed in a random field. There we took more pictures, jumped out, and headed back to the winery. There they had a cake for us to celebrate our anniversary with, and we just hung out until our next adventure.





Next we hopped into a Jeep and were off on a winery tour. We went to four wineries where we did 6 tastings at each. It was a lot to drink, especially for us, but we managed. We did some off-roading, stopped at some pretty look-out points, went through some vineyards and tried the grapes, saw the fermentation process, checked out a barrel room, and were learned a ton about the whole process. It was several hours and a really cool, informative, and fun thing to do/see. After that, we were pooped, so we grabbed some take-out and went to our hotel to watch some college football (our fav!)


Sunday morning we got up and headed out to South Coast Winery (the #1 rated winery in California). It is a beautiful winery and beautiful property! We checked in for our villa, which was amazing. It was tucked into the vineyard, was huge, and had a gorgeous view of the vineyards and mountains. We went to the wine tasting room, where we tried some delicious wines and had a great time with our "bartender" Jenn. After a yummy lunch out on the deck of their restaurant, we went to the spa where we had massages and hung out for the afternoon. Steve had us dinner reservations, so we got all cleaned up and headed to a beautiful and absolutely off-the-charts dinner. They brought us out cheesecake for dessert, and we pretty much had to be rolled out of there when it was all said and done. We then went back to our villa where we cut the top layer of our cake, which was surprisingly moist and yummy! Next was gift time :)


Steve does video editing as a side thing, and he is amazing at it. So for our wedding, we hired videographers, but then Steve took all the raw footage and edited the video himself. Part of my gift was a 3 DVD set of all our pre-wedding festivities edited, our wedding ceremony & reception, and our honeymoon. It was absolutely incredible; he did the most phenomenal job on it, and it was so fun to watch together on our 1 year anniversary. I had made Steve a 50 page scrapbook of everything from our engagement through leaving for our honeymoon. If you know anything about scrapbooking, then you know it was an intense process. He loved it! He also had taken a picture that we took from the first night on our honeymoon in Antigua of the beach and had it blown up and framed. It is a gorgeous picture with a lot of sentimental value, and it's in a gorgeous frame. It was the most perfect 1 year anniversary ever!

Monday morning we slept in, had room service, and hung out for the morning. It was nice to just enjoy each others company. We did eventually get up and going to the spa where we had some more treatments and hung out for the afternoon. We went into the vineyards to pick some grapes, which are super yummy, and now we have a ton of them. We checked out and headed home savoring the incredible weekend we had that felt like it had almost been a full week of adventures and enjoyment.

Literally, our 1 year anniversary celebration was one of the best weekends of my life! It was so much fun to remember what we were doing and where we were at just 1 year ago with the wedding festivities. It was fun to talk about and remember our special day, and talk about how much we have done, how far we have come, and all the joy it has brought. We have done so much already in 1 year, and we have been so blessed beyond belief in 1 year. The best part we discovered is that it is just the beginning of a whole lifetime of joys, memories, blessings, fun, adventures, love...that is an amazing and very, very exciting thought!!!