A Friendtastic Sunday!

We spent a Sunday in Siesta Key, and we had the chance to see not one but TWO friends that day! A friendtastic Sunday!

My college roommate, Christi, lives in Sarasota, which is basically the same as Siesta Key. (Fun fact: Christi was actually at our wedding!) She not only wanted to see us while we were in town, but she invited us to attend church with her and then to lunch after!

Church didn't start until 11, so we were able to begin our Sunday with a leisurely beach walk. No complaints there!

I mean, doesn't it just break your heart???

We got ready and went to church, and I have to say, this church was probably one of the friendliest I've ever visited on vacation! Ryan and I decided if we lived in the area, we'd go there. Great people! I took a couple of pictures but they're kind of blurry. It was dark and I was trying not to be a church tourist.

Then we went to lunch! We were excited to eat with not just Christi, but her parents and her brother, too! (Her brother is not in the picture...he missed the photo shoot.) They took us to Marina Jack, which is the land restaurant twin to the boat we'd been on the day before! We ate on this outside patio overlooking the marina. Ahhhhhhh. I love Florida in the winter!

We stayed forever just talking with them. So much fun. And of course, Ryan makes friends wherever he goes, so he completely fell in love with Christi's family. (Easy to do.)

We hadn't been back to the hotel very long before it was time to hit the beach for sunset again!

By the way, Sunday night was NOT an easy night to get good sunset pictures. There were tons of people out and while they were all having great family time, I now have them preserved in my sunset photos. LOL!

After sunset, we met up with our second friend of the day! Ryan's wrestling coach from high school now lives in Siesta Key, and we met him for dinner!

We hadn't seen him for over 20 years, so it was fun to catch up with him!

Ryan decided later that he wanted ice cream, so we walked down to this little ice cream shop, and they had both our favorites!!

(And clearly they also have the light from our kitchen!)

A fun Sunday!! :)

The Date Inspired by the Letter V

We squeezed in three alphabetical dates on our trip! Today I'll tell you about the first one, which happened on our actual anniversary.

This was our vintage date, which included a voyage through Sarasota Bay! I'd seen the idea to do a vintage date (aka repeat a date from early in your relationship) and while I'd originally had a few other dates in mind, this came up as an even better option!

When we were on our honeymoon, we went on a sunset dinner cruise, but the boat also takes lunch cruises, so this time around, we did the daytime version of the cruise. And my goodness, I'm not sure we could have had a much more perfect day!

Just for funsies, I wore the same dress I wore on the original cruise. Ryan almost wore the same shirt, but I think it became a little too matchy-matchy for him, so he switched it up.

The cruise was on the Marina Jack II, which is a two-deck boat. Last time we completely lucked out and only 8 people were on board for dinner. This time there were more than 8, but it still wasn't even remotely full, so we had tons of space and privacy.

Waiting to board:

We elected to sit upstairs again, just like last time, and the view throughout the Bay was great. Last time we were really focused on the sunset and then it was dark (obviously), so this time we got to enjoy seeing all the homes on the Bay in full daylight!

Do I have a problem when I'm taking a photo with one camera while holding another one?

While we waited for lunch to be served, we went out on the open air deck to get a few pictures and enjoy the scenery/big bridge.

Lunch was similar to the dinner we'd had last time, only not quite so much food. (AKA normal amounts.) Delicious! We ate and house hunted. (ha!)

I actually passed up a chocolate dessert (WHAT?!!?) to try the key lime cheesecake. I figured when in Florida...

When we had finished eating, we went out to the open air deck again to enjoy coffee and the lovely 80 degree breeze!

The cruise lasted about an hour and a half and then we were back on land.

It was the perfect vintage voyage. Worth the money and didn't spoil the first round's memories in any way! (I think doing a vintage date might be tricky, because you can't fully repeat an experience. This one was similar enough to keep the vintage vibe, but different enough that it felt new!)

To see all our alphabetical dates, go here!

Five Beautiful Years!

Our first full day in Florida also happened to be our anniversary! What a happy day, right? We were so thankful that the day (weather-wise) turned out to be much like our wedding day. It's always a gamble to travel twenty-some odd hours from home and hope for good weather. No real control over that on our end, right? But we were so thankful for a warm, sunny, beautiful day.

Just like our wedding day, we got up early and went down to the beach to drink coffee, eat breakfast, exchange gifts, write letters, and wash each others' feet. It seemed busier this time than it did on our wedding day, but maybe on that day, it was really busy and we were just oblivious. So we sat out there with all the runners, yoga class folks, and birds, and had a magnificent time.

Ahhh...sunrise.

 My gift from Ryan!

 Four thousand points to him for researching on his own to find out the theme for anniversary #5 was wood and getting one of my favorite pictures of us put on pallet-style wall art. I love it!

 Ryan's gift from me. (I told him when they were wrapped and sitting together at home before we left that it was entirely possible we got each other the same thing. They matched!)

 I wrote him a letter on the back of this. It is my continual promise to him!

Hello, morning.

On our actual wedding day, we wrote letters to each other, rolled them up, and put them in these bottles, along with sand from our beach. Every year, on our anniversary, we read the letter from last year and replace it with a new letter. This year we got to continue the tradition on our beach again!

 Ryan got the water for our foot-washing.

 Sweet moments.

After our time on the beach, we recreated our wedding photos, like we do every year, but there are a ton of those, so I'll save that for another day. :) OH! And as we were getting ready for that, guess what we found? Our missing chalkboards. Ryan had packed them after all! So we own four now. Double the chalkboard fun!

Then we went on our date inspired by the letter V, so I'll tell you about that tomorrow.

After our date, we ran a few errands. I'd written thank you notes to the resort where we stayed and to the salon where I got my hair done on our wedding day, and we delivered those notes. We also went in search of cupcakes to have that evening, as is our tradition. We talked about these on the podcast, but here they are! Cupcakes in a jar! And we chose some interesting names. (Neither are representative of our feelings toward marriage or the last five years, thankyouverymuch.) Super super cute cupcake shop!

Amazingly enough, by the time we got done with all this, it was almost time for sunset. WHAT!? Weren't we just at the sunrise? We had heard there was going to be a wedding that night at sunset, and we were so excited, because we had so many beach lurkers attend our wedding that we wanted to see what that was like. So yep, we crashed a wedding! (From a respectable distance.)

The beach all set up. Reminded us a lot of our wedding day!

 Lurkers!!

 Wedding in progress:

 (The officiant told the wedding crowd to put their phones away and be present, so I didn't dare take more than that one picture. I was afraid I'd get kicked off the beach!)

Ryan got bored and started taking sunset pictures. I won't lie. He rocked them.

A little sand fun. :)

Since we'd had our fancy meal at noon (that story is tomorrow) we went low key for dinner. Ordered a pizza, watched our wedding video, and ate our aforementioned cupcakes with sparkling grape juice!

A very fun day, and the perfect celebration to five years!