Weekend to Remember, Part 1

I mentioned last week that we were preparing to head out for a “Weekend to Remember”, and we are back and so excited to share our experience.
So, like most couples we feel we have a pretty good marriage, we all have our moments but nothing that we didn’t feel like we could overcome because we’re both committed to God, each other and our children. I have a friend who went to this getaway a few years ago and raved about it; we have been wanting to go since then but it never quite worked out. Well, as we started considering what we could do for our anniversary now that we think A can handle more than a night without us there happened to be an event on the weekend before our anniversary and in Destin, Florida which is a beautiful beach town in the Panhandle of Florida, off the Gulf of Mexico. Around the same time we found a coupon code for Buy one, Get one registration so we were sold! We booked our tickets and our hotel room and we were very excited for a weekend to reconnect, who couldn’t use one of those?
Because the Conference keeps a pretty busy schedule and we wanted to be able to enjoy the beach we headed out a day early.
Day 1: On Thursday, we dropped off the kids at school and headed to work for a half day. Around lunch time we left the office, picked up lunch and made the six hour drive to Destin. I bought along some couples conversation starters so we had fun discussing those and the ride didn’t seem that long. We were pleasantly surprised when we realized that Destin is in the Central time zone, so we gained an hour on the drive there.

(The view on the long road into Fort Walton beach area)

When we arrived at the Hilton San Destin we were told that a room upgrade was available for only $9 more per night that would put us on a higher floor. Boy were we excited when we realized that we ended up on the highest floor in a junior suite. Here are a couple pictures of our room.

 

And the view from our balcony

Once we got settled in we needed to go get dinner so we stopped at a local pizza place and came back to the hotel to relax. It got dark pretty early over there so there wasn’t too much we could explore. We called to check on the kids and found out that A spent most of her day at school crying because she knew we were leaving. She was emotional when we spoke to her but we were confident she would be OK. L’s mom was staying at our house to take care of them for 2 of the days and C was being an excellent big brother. We turned in early and slept with the balcony door open so we could enjoy the sound of the ocean, so relaxing!

Day 2: Friday morning we woke up to pouring rain and thick fog. I should have taken a picture because you couldn’t see passed the railing of our balcony. We weren’t going to let that stop us from exploring so we got ready, headed out for breakfast and hit the Outlet Mall for some shopping. And let me tell you, it was some of the best outlet shopping we’ve ever done and we live pretty close to some big outlet malls. We promised the kids we would bring them back some gifts and we sure delivered. I even got some clothes out of the deal. We worked up an appetite with all that shopping so we picked up lunch and headed back to the hotel with our treasures and our lunch and just hung out until it was time to check in for our first session.

(A little sampling of the rain we had all weekend)

Next post: Friday and Saturday sessions from the conference.

If your interested in attending a Weekend to Remember conference, click this link for a discounted rate. It typically costs $149.99 per person, with this link you can attend for $89.99 per person. Register for a Weekend To Remember