CharlesTONSoffun

This past weekend I met 4 of my oldest and best friends in Charleston for a girls weekend. These girls and I have been best friends since high school, with the exception of Steph (aka Nator), who became our best friend in college. We got it planned a few months ago and I was counting down the days!

Views of downtown Charleston

The "Holy City" has lots of beautiful churches

Here's how the weekend went down.
Friday: everyone trickled in as they could. The girls went out to eat somewhere in Mount Pleasant near Jacqui's house and got back to Jacqui's right around the same time as I arrived, around 9:30. The rest of the night was spent around Jacqui's dining room table talking, laughing and drinking wine. It was pretty low key and perfect!

Saturday: we all got up and had a quick bite of breakfast at Jacqui's house. Our original plan for Saturday included going to the beach or out on the boat. Alas, the Mother Nature had other plans for us. It was raining pretty hard so we had to come up with a new plan. Throughout the morning we kept going around and around about where we wanted to eat brunch or lunch and finally we decided to go downtown to Husk. Jacqui's husband, Adam, left to go get our name on the list while we got ready. He is awesome like that. He called once he got there and let us know it was going to be an hour and a half wait. Ouch. We were hungry. We killed some time by going to Vendue rooftop for an appetizer and drinks. It was here that we discussed our Instagram strategy and came up with our hashtag for the weekend. We left it up to our creative/smartest friend, Colby to do the honors. We finally settled on #charlestonsoffun, which is really Charlestons of fun (mashup between Charleston and tons). It sounds better when you actually say it. When it's written out, it just looks like we are misspelling something. We didn't realize that until after we were Instagraming. LOL. We just stuck with it.

Cheers!

L to R: me, Diane, Nator, Jacqui, Colby

Diane and Nator

Jacqui working on our Instagram pics

Colby and me

We eventually got a call from Adam that our table was ready so we closed up at Vendue and walked to Husk.

Lunch at Husk was so good! We had a great time and even sang a little bit at our table - so fun! Thanks to Adam for getting there and reserving our table. He got some major "good hubby" points.

 

Our fabulous hosts for the weekend, Jacqui and Adam!

 

Colby and me

Nator, Diane and me

Colby and her vino

Jacqui and Nator

Ham and cheese sandwich

Cheeseburger

After our delicious lunch, we went back to Jacqui's to hang out and play Heads Up. Have you played it yet? It's so fun! It's an iPad app and can provide HOURS (seriously) of entertainment.

After some quality Heads Up time, we got ready for the evening and headed back downtown. This is what it looks like going over the Cooper River Bridge towards downtown with a storm a-brewin.

First stop: Cypress! Our triplet friends, Adam, Jon and Matt Hammond, were coincidentally having a family beach trip at Folly Beach at the same time and agreed to grab their crew and meet up with us for drinks on Saturday night.

Hellos all around!

My lavender martini - yummmmm

Matt and Vicki Hammond

Me and Jacqui

Our obligatory high school alumni picture,
and yes, we are posing with our Maverick signs :)

Clemson alumni group pic

The whole group!

Colby and her wine (again) - this must be her fave, Rose!
BTW, do you notice a trend here? haha

Adam H. and Jason

Team Gantt

The girls...+ Adam

 

After we've been here a while....Diane, Adam G., Adam H.

 

The mayhem continues

We had so much fun catching up with our old buddies. After we left Cypress, we went to grab a cocktail at Cocktail Club while we waited for our table to be ready for dinner.

Jacqui, me, Colby

Jacqui, me, Colby, Diane and Nator

My gorgeous bracelet model friends!

When we got the heads up that we could be seated, we closed out and headed across the street for dinner at Basil Thai restaurant.  It was so delicious!

That Colby is so sarcastic!

Diane, Nator and me

Jacqui and Colbs

And...later...

No words. Anyway, after dinner, we were d-o-n-e and grabbed a cab back to Jacqui's house in Mount Pleasant. We did pull out the iPad when we got back and played some more Heads Up. We couldn't get enough. So much fun!

Sunday: the weekend concluded with Sunday brunch at Red Drum in Mt. Pleasant. Nator wasn't feeling well (uh oh....) and decided to skip brunch and hit the road.

The highlight of our brunch was this delicious donut plate

Last pic of us from our super fun weekend

I loved spending so much quality time with my girlfriends. It was a relaxing and fun weekend. I will have to say that I was super tired. This old mama is not used to staying up late (keep in mind, I do go to bed early but sometimes have to get up in the middle of the night...hahaha) and enjoying so many adult beverages! Being tired was definitely worth it to have such a fantastic weekend with my besties.

Meanwhile, back at the homestead, Ashley came in for the weekend to stay with Thomas and help with the boys. Although Thomas is 100% capable of doing it on his own, I know he was so glad to have the assistance, extra hands, entertainment, adult conversation and brother-sister bonding time with Ashley. Ashley was so incredibly sweet to leave her own family for the weekend to come hang out at our house. Every time I checked in on them, they had it all under control. They did awesome sticking to the schedule. I left them a "to-do" list in case they had any extra time on their hands. It was kind of a "if you find time, GREAT, but if not, no big deal" list and I was just hoping they could possibly knock off one or two things. When I got home, I was pleasantly surprised to see so many of things done! They hung pictures, they grocery shopped, they (Ashley) made dinner and cookies and even did some really cute arts and crafts with the babies. All this while taking care of 11 month old triplets! Impressive! I had my camera with me in Charleston so they didn't really take pictures, but I did get this one texted to me. 

Thomas texted me that picture and said William was rocking and trying to follow his brother around while Stokes was crawling. My response was "He can't do it without me there!!!!" Haha! As it turns out, he face-planted. But hey, he's trying! He will be crawling soon.

Update - I'm writing this post one week later and he's still not quite there with the crawling. It won't be long though!

The weekend was great and the girls and I have decided we will try to do a weekend like this a few times a year on the regular. Next stop - either Charlotte or Atlanta! Woo hoo!