My actual wedding anniversary was June 18th, but due to my husband’s demanding career and it being the end of the quarter we were forced to hold off our celebration until this past weekend. There was talk of Vegas, a bed and breakfast in Fredericksburg, or possibly just eating our almost 13 month old wedding cake at home and calling it a day, but we settled on a staycation… A night to enjoy our glorious city that post baby, we rarely enjoy together.

We could only muster up enough courage to take a bite each of our wedding cake. Wesley spit his into the sink. It tasted like coconut, but I didn’t order a coconut cake… hmmm?

I’m a bit of an inner party animal so doing it up downtown style sounded RIGHT up my alley! Wesley planned a weekend at the W Hotel {our wedding night suite location} to ring in the 1 year mark.

So not to make this the longest story ever I’m going to bullet our events… Maybe you’ll learn something from our less than perfect weekend if you decide to plan a staycation in Austin.

• Charlie Robison Concert– I saw that Charlie Robison was playing at Antone’s Friday night and thought what a fun thing to do instead of the typical dinner thing. Well it would’ve been perfect except the concert was canceled the Wednesday before our scheduled staycation. Awesome. Now what?

• Trying To Duplicate Our Wedding Night- You know that moment when you think it would be cool to have a redo of a night, moment, or whatever? Just don’t. It’s impossible to duplicate. Apparently Wesley’s parents paid an arm, leg, thigh, torso, and pinky toe for our honeymoon suite, because we thought {based on the price of the room} we were getting a bad A$$ room. Unfortunately, it was a fraction of the size and way less sexy! Yes floor to ceiling windows in the bathroom does do the trick. I wish we would have used those 8 hours we spent in the honeymoon suite more wisely looking back. It was an awesome room and all we did was sleep in it. I’ll never have another wedding night, but if I could redo ours I would have stayed in Austin a bit longer before our flight to Maui so we could have relaxed and enjoyed our room longer.

• The Weekend Itself- I have a lot of memories of our staycation weekend, but here are the… umm… highlights: Waitress dropping a full aluminum beer can on the top of my foot at W’s Wet Bar {Pool}, being told by W’s concierge to check out Maria Maria for breakfast and walking the 4-5 blocks in blazing saddles heat to realize they don’t open until 11 am and it’s only 9:30 am, the AC going out in our over priced W Hotel room, not being able to find a pool lounge chair at 2 pm on a Friday in our over priced hotel, and lastly, frying the soles of our feet on the scorching hot concrete by the pool–seriously I felt like I was at the river and needed to wear tennies the whole time.

The weekend wasn’t a total loss, because we did have some major highlights too!

• Champagne Champagne Champagne!!!- We were greeted with a bottle of champagne upon arrival by the W staff. My best friend brought a bottle of champagne to share at our couples dinner at Botticelli’s on South Congress. We were surprised to find another bottle of champ in our room Saturday night from our amazing neighbors, Chuck and Tom, and we had EVEN more champagne as a gift from the hotel for our anniversary dinner at Trace (the hotel’s restaurant).

• Good Deeds- Wesley forgot to pack his pants…. Our amazing neighbor {really much more than a neighbor and WAY more just our friend} came all the way from Lakeway to bring my hubs some pants! Thanks, Thomas!

• The Derailers- Since Charlie Robison was canceled we made lemons out of lemonade and found out The Derailers were playing at the Continental Club. Despite being told by a “regular” club goer that I needed to watch the spikes on my heels {I guess I pick up my feet when dancing and nicked her}, we had a blast with my BFF and her hubs dancing the night away! AND another highlight was when they treated us to our fabulous meal at Botticelli’s! Lord, we have amazing friends that love us!

There were more highlights for sure and all in all, it was a fab weekend. We felt a little old {old in terms of what we like to do for fun not necessarily old in numbers} with the W’s crowd and probably won’t staycation again for our anniversary for years to come, but we loved all the special people that made our weekend fabulous!

Thank you, Chris, Xaviera, Tom, Chuck, Jay, Glenn, and Leanna for making our 1 year memorable!

So what’s the take away today??? Ah nothing, just sharing my festivities with you all! How did you celebrate your 1 year anniversary? Paper is the staple 1 year gift—Wesley and I have a Big Fat “paper” receipt from the W Hotel! What’s yours???