The Big O-N-E

Year, that is! As you can see from the new and improved ticker on the right hand side of the blog, Aaron and I have officially been married one year and we celebrated this weekend with a trip to warm and sunny Palm Springs.

I wanted to go somewhere we could count on being warm this time of year so the desert was an obvious choice. It turned out to be a great choice. The weather was beautiful and we had a pretty perfect weekend of relaxing and enjoying each other's company and the way God has blessed us every one of the 365 days we have been married.

We left Malibu on Friday at about 2:30. The drive to Palm Springs is about two and a half hours but because we had to go through LA, we hit Ontario (aka, a Chick Fil A) at almost 6pm. Craziness. Fortunately, Chick Fil A in your belly makes everything a little more tolerable. We made one more stop at some outlets and then arrived at our hotel, the Renaissance Esmerelda. We were pretty tired so we pretty much hit the hay. After being woken up a few times by some loud talking, I whispered to Aaron, "are you awake?" He had been woken up too so we both talked about how loud it was, haha. The hotel is set up in an atrium style and there is a lounge on the bottom floor. We were on the highest floor, the 7th floor, and yet, it sounded like the people were sitting outside our door, yelling. So, first thing Saturday morning, we went to the front desk to ask if we could switch rooms. Suprisingly, the lady told us that she could switch our room and we could move right away to a room around the corner from our original room. We were pretty happy with this and so you can imagine our surprise when she asked if we were going to go to breakfast. We told her that we were going to go out (away from the hotel) and she told us that she would like to take care of our meal. So, off we went to switch rooms and then on to enjoy a $22 breakfast buffet (of which we probably did not eat $22 worth of food combined, haha). Here we are at the restaurant overlooking the pool after breakfast:

As annoying as Friday night's shenanigans had been, we were pretty impressed with the way that the hotel staff handled our complaints.

We spent the rest of Saturday morning at the pool and it was lovely. We headed into town for a late lunch and spent the rest of Saturday hanging out in our room and back out in the sunshine at the pool. We decided to go to P.F. Chang's for dinner on Saturday night and it was delicious, of course!

After dinner, we watched the OKC Thunder pull out a victory against the Lakers, woo hoo! And Saturday night was much quieter than Friday so we were happy about that, too!

Sunday morning came too quickly and we were packed and ready to head out before we knew it. We got to sneak in a few pictures of the pool before everyone started claiming their spots for the day.



We drove out to downtown Palm Springs (we were technically in the desert city of Indian Wells for the weekend) for our anniversary breakfast on the strip at Ruby's Diner.

The lady who offered to take our picture didn't realize that we were actually trying to stand in front of the creepy statue man.

Sadly, we were back in LA all too quickly. We spent the rest of the day relaxing and catching up on some stuff around the house. We did have some of our leftover wedding cake and it tasted pretty good! I have a picture but it's in the camera still so I will try to get it uploaded when I do my next post. **Updated to add**

We also talked to my mom since she was nice enough to share her birthday with us last year!

We had a great weekend and even though we went away which was very special, it felt like a pretty normal, wonderful couple of days in our regular lives. Of course I bawled my eyes out when I read the card Aaron had bought me but, other than moments like that, my favorite part of the weekend was looking at Aaron and knowing that this was just one of many anniversaries that we will get to celebrate together. It has truly been the best year of my life and I know that it only gets better. We are so blessed to have not only each other, but our loving families and precious friends. We have everything to be thankful for.

Hope you had a nice weekend as well!

"Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty." John 6:35