Our 1st Anniversary

Our 1st Anniversary was Sunday, July 11th. Since we got married I've been wanting to plan a one year anniversary trip....but as it got closer and being in the middle of trying to buy a house, it just didn't make sense to go on a long, expensive trip right now. So like I said in the previous posts, we had been looking for cabins in either MD, VA or WV so we could take the dogs but places were either already booked, you could only book weekly or just too expensive because the house was bigger than we needed so they were just charging more. By the way vrbo.com and homeaway.com are great sites to look for vacation rentals. So we looked into other local places and decided on Atlantic City, we were even more excited when we were able to snag a hotel for just $116 a night because we had plans to go on a Sunday and Monday (it was $316 for Saturday night alone).

Our plans were to leave on Sunday and since our Bakery that did our wedding cake, Sweet Bakery & Cafe offered us a complimentary 6" cake (as I explained in a previous post). We decided to pick it up on Saturday because we didn't want to try and take it with us. And because I didn't want to pick up this nice cake and eat just a boring dinner (I did not feel like cooking, I was tired from cleaning and packing)....We decided it would be nice to pick up some Macaroni Grill, which is what we had exactly a year before for our rehearsal dinner. So it turned out to be a nice night with the dinner & cake. The bakery did an excellent job recreating the cake and it was super yummy! They even put the black ribbon at the bottom! :)

The morning of our anniversary we just got up and finished packing last minute things and left at 11:00. I had told Chance I needed to make a stop before we got on the road but didn't tell him where. Earlier in the week I had received an email from the Hilton (I guess I'm on their mailing list) that next month the Hilton where we got married will be turning into a Double Tree. They're not tearing it down, they're just converting it I guess. We don't really have any pictures with the Hilton sign in it and I figured one day we might actually appreciate having a picture or two since it's no longer going to be "the Hilton where we got married", it's going to be the "Double Tree that used to be the Hilton where we got married"...lame. So we felt a little silly jumping out of the car and taking a picture but it was kind of nice :)

So then it was off to Atlantic City! It wasn't a bad drive at all, we were hoping to go to Sonic on the way there but forgot to pay attention and the GPS took us a different way....far away from the Sonic.

We finally got into Atlantic City around 3:45ish and went straight to the hotel. We stayed at the Trump Taj Mahal. I had put a note on the reservation that it was our one year wedding anniversary and when we checked in we got a room upgrade to the executive suite. It was more like a business suite but it was still much larger than we were going to have, it was pretty awesome. We had bought tickets for the Cirque Dreams Jungle Fantasy show at the Taj Mahal at 8:00 so we had to rush to dinner by the time we were settled in the room. We decided to go with a safe, not horribly expensive choice and eat a Phillips at the Pier shops at Ceasers...and it was yum! But then we had to rush back in time for Cirque Dreams which was awesome by the way! When it started off, I was concerned that it might not be what I thought but then they did this amazing jump roping thing and it was just great. I want to go see every Cirque Dreams/Cirque de Soleil ever! At the end of the show we each received $10 Trump casino cards so we went and played the slots a little...I won $75 right away....I decided to keep going and lost $5 and then I cashed out but $70 for free, woo hoo! We walked around a little to see the hotel and casino. It was so nice in there, we loved it!

All day Monday we had planned to just do whatever and that we did. The main thing we wanted to do was go down to the Pier Shops at Ceasers and thats what we did first. We had breakfast at the hotel buffet and then walked down. They had some great but high end stores. I was particularly excited to find Bijoux Terner which was a small store on a cruise ship for our honeymoon! I had bought this great scarf/shawl that I love and a really cute clutch and the best part is everything in their store is just $10. So I was really excited to see this store there. I bought another color scarf and a cute purse for a grand total of $20 :)

We walked around the boardwalk and watched the awesome watershow inside the Pier Shops. Then we went to the pool for the afternoon. For dinner we went to the Hard Rock Cafe which was yum. After that we walked over on the Steel Pier and got a chariacture (sp?) done! Later we got a funnel cake, walked on the beach, went and lost $40 on the slot machines, bought some candy from the awesome candy store and called it a night!

The next morning we decided to check out early so we could make stops on the way home....turns out we just ended up making one stop because the GPS took us a different way and we didn't see the things on the way back that we had wanted to stop and see on the way there. So we stopped and got some Sonic, yum! And stopped in the petstore in the same shopping center to get new toys for the puppies.

We got home around 2:30 and just watched tv until we went to bed.

We had the best time, it was really nice! So glad that we were able to get away for our anniversary. What a wonderful year this has been. So looking forward to many many more with the best husband anyone could ever ask for!