Hello, friends!
As I mentioned, Saturday was my bachelorette party, which was a trip out to Virginia wine country with 16 of my girlfriends!
It was so fun to have such a big group of my favorites all together. 🙂 My high school BFF and matron of honor in our wedding, Jenny, hosted the shindig and did a fabulous job organizing everything! She rocks.
AND: Jenny is pregnant!! I was so excited to see her mini baby bump in person. 🙂 She’s due in March!
She had this adorable “The future Mrs” shirt made for me; tiara was courtesy of Gretchen. 🙂
The ladies and I all met up at a friend’s place and piled on to a bus to head out toward wine country and begin the fun! I had friends from all walks of life present — childhood, high school, college, DC area/work friends, and grad school! It was a great mix and wonderful to see everyone. 🙂 If you’ve been reading the blog for a couple years now you probably recognize most of them from various trips and outings!
Hunter, my friend from college in the photo on the left above, wins for farthest traveled for the party — she flew in from San Francisco! She says it was worth it. 😉
We visited two wineries — first stop, The Winery at La Grange!
The scenery was gorgeous and our tasting was set up in a tent with some fabulous views.
Our next stop on the tour was Pearmund Cellars!
Being silly with my high school girlfriends — we’re all making an “M” for Mustangs, our high school mascot! 😉
I would HIGHLY recommend this winery to you guys — the first winery was beautiful but the service was a million times better at Pearmund. They greeted us graciously and whisked us off to a private tasting in the fermenting room.
Here I am with our tasting guide — he was very knowledgeable and friendly. We were all big fans. 🙂
The coolest thing about this winery was that we got to taste unfiltered still aging wine directly from the steel vat taps! It was so good — slightly fizzy and cloudy with a sweet juice like taste.
AND I got to help press the grapes. 🙂
So fun!
There was a bit of a snafu when we tried to leave the winery and discovered the bus had broken down — FAIL! We ended up having to wait like an hour and a half for a replacement bus, which was super lame, but the winery was really nice and stayed open so we could use their bathrooms and also gave us some veggie trays to snack on. 🙂 Sadly we couldn’t drink any of the wine we’d purchased, though, as the winery was technically closed! Oh well. At least the scenery was nice. 🙂 We all made the best of it and had fun hanging out!
The bus finally arrived and brought us back so we could join Matt and some of our guy friends, who were waiting to host a fun BBQ birthday bash after party for me! I didn’t get any photos because it was dark out (although we do have some rather hilarious photo booth pictures — long story short, we bought a LivingSocial deal for a photo booth to use at the wedding and then discovered they were busy on our date and we couldn’t get a refund… hence the photo booth making an appearance at my birthday bash instead! It went to good use), but we had a blast. Thank you to Matt and our guy friends for hosting! 🙂
What a fabulous weekend. I felt very loved and can’t wait to celebrate with everyone again in less than 3 weeks (!!) at our wedding!