Good morning! How was your weekend? Did you do anything fun? I was loving the great fall weather. Know what else I was loving? BOOKING A VENUE AND A DATE!!! If you’ve been following B2B for a while, you already know that wedding planning thus far has been stressful. Being on a budget, having no idea what I want and having a busy schedule anyway has made the whole process just not that fun. BUT, now that we have a venue and a date I already feel a million times better. Before we get to that, let’s chat about the rest of the weekend, too.

After work on Friday, I met up with my sister at Hopsters in Newton Corner. This place is literally walking distance from my apartment and they sell lots of craft beers and delicious looking charcuterie boards and flatbread pizzas. On top of that, you can even make your own beer there, which sounds like a fun activity even for someone like me who isn’t a big beer person.

The purpose for our meetup was so that I could finally officially ask her to be my Maid of Honor! I scoured Etsy for a while until I found this bracelet, which had my sisters name all over it (literally and figuratively!)- she loves bracelets and monogramed items so this couldn’t have been more perfect. Luckily, she agreed 🙂

When I got home, RM and I made a nice healthy fish dinner, thanks to my mom’s friend Jean’s husband who caught the fish!

A little while after dinner, it was snack time. Yes, we have a snack time every night- it’s my favorite! We always try to have healthy snacks like paleo banana bread muffins or toast or something else that’s not loaded with tons of sugar. On Friday, RM toasted up some Ezekiel bread, topped it with almond butter and my mom’s homemade blueberry jam, bananas, cinnamon and ground flax seed. Delicious!

After teaching on Saturday, I rushed home to shower and hit the road to head up to Jackson, NH to look at The Wentworth Inn as a possible wedding venue.

I had spoken with Kim, the fantastic wedding planner, a few times leading up to our visit and was totally in love with the venue before even seeing it in person! It was affordable, included a lot of things in the package that most other places didn’t include (90 minutes of full open bar at the cocktail hour?! yes, please!) and seemed like a great mini destination place since it’s just 10 minutes north of North Conway. I also loved that everyone could stay on site, which eliminated the need for us to need to book buses or vans or some other type of transportation. And, they source all of their food locally, from 15 nearby farms, to be exact, and they said nothing is ever frozen. For foodies like us, we loved the sounds of that!

After a tour and long discussion with Kim, we were pretty sure we were going to book our wedding at The Wentworth… on the 4th of July! They were giving a phenomenal discount to have the wedding on that day, one that was just too good to pass up, so we are going to be getting married on July 4th, 2016! We are hoping it doesn’t throw a wrench into people’s normal 4th of July plans, but since the holiday is on a Monday, we hope that people can do celebrating on Saturday and Sunday and be with us on Monday-  I promise it will be a good party!

After our tour, we decided to walk to the Wildcat Tavern for a late afternoon snack and drink since we didn’t have lunch. The trio dip platter was a fantastic option and their wine selection was incredible! Ashley- they had La Crema by the glass 🙂

When we got back to our room, RM laughed and said we apparently didn’t need to get a snack. Curious, I went over to see what he was looking at and was so surprised by the super sweet gesture that Kim had done by sending us a nice card and a cheese platter.

It’s little things like this that really go a long way with potential clients- we appreciated it so much!

After resting for a bit, we went down to the hotel bar to have some dinner. They have a full restaurant, but we prefer the bar atmosphere. The food was unbelievable- I got the lamb stew and RM got the steak and everything was absolutely delicious and so fresh tasting!

We also shared some sort of apple tart with cinnamon ice cream for dessert that went unpictured because we were too impatient to wait for me to get my phone to take a picture 😉

Another great thing about the Inn is that breakfast and breakfast tip are included in your room rate. When we saw all that they had to offer for breakfast, we couldn’t believe it! They had a really nice continental breakfast bar with fruit, yogurt, cereal, pastries, etc., but they also had a full breakfast menu. We decided to split both of the specials: blueberry pancakes and eggs benedict, with a side of homemade corn beef hash.

Oh, my, God. Everything was so fresh and flavorful and just delicious.

We hit the road after breakfast so RM could be back in time to watch the game. I decided to make good use of time and went to Whole Foods. I treated myself to a smoothie since I was hungry for lunch at that point.

We decided we wanted to do a roast chicken dinner so I prepped that when I got back before going to a yoga class.

There is a CorePower Yoga a short walk from our apartment and last week there was a day where I just didn’t feel like going to the gym so I decided to check it out. They offer a free first week for new students which is an amazing deal, so I’m trying to get the most use out of it. Yesterday, the only class they had in a time that worked for me was their Yoga Sculpt class, which is almost like a yoga bootcamp. I really wanted a restorative yoga, but I ended up really loving the Yoga Sculpt class- we started and ended with nice yoga flows, but in the middle we used weights and did all sorts of lunges, pushups, squats, jumping jacks, burpees, etc…. I was totally in my element, even in the 98* room! I felt great when I left.

I popped the chicken and veggies in the oven when I got home and everything came out SO GOOD! I have never made a roast chicken before even though it’s my favorite meal so I was a little nervous but everything tasted delicious.

And that’s about it. If you made it this far, thank you!!

Now that we have our venue and date picked, I can focus on the fun stuff like dress shopping and invites and things like that! Feels SO GOOD to have the biggest part of wedding planning checked off 🙂

Questions for you: What was the best part of your weekend? Do you prefer beer or wine? What’s your favorite dinner meal? What do you have going on this week?