Girl's Weekend

A childhood friend of ours was having a party this weekend so Lisa flew down to join in the festivities.

Rather than sleep on my couch, Lisa opted for a hotel room in Laguna Beach for the night which meant that I got to stay the night in Laguna Beach too.  Lucky Me!

We made it to the beach just in time to see this from our balcony:

It was stunning.


Chilling out at the hotel before dinner

Lisa booked a cute little hotel in Laguna Beach right off Pacific Coast Highway.  They had just renovated it and it had a cute little beach cottage feel.  Since I rarely get out, I took some pictures of the room.

It was a Jr. suite, so this was the living room/pull out couch where I slept.  I love the colors.

Small bedroom with a queen bed

It had the weirdest tub ever.  I got into it with my clothes on to see if I would fit and I could NOT get out.  Seriously.  I had to ask Joe to come and help me get out of it.  Needless to say I opted for a shower instead of a bath.

It had a small kitchen too but it had not one plate or utensil so I'm not sure how you were supposed to do any cooking.  I guess you had to bring your own stuff.

On our way to dinner we saw this:

I may have to start walking to work.

View from our balcony in the morning. It was such  beautiful day!

Our balcony

Cute beachy themed lobby

(please excuse all the pictures of the hotel.  As I mentioned earlier, I don't get out much  (:

Lisa's visit coincided with Laguna Beach's Patriot Day Parade.  This is apparently a huge deal.  We found ourselves a spot on the parade route and hunkered down to watch. It was downright hot and we both got a little sunburned.  I took roughly a thousand pictures of the parade but after I downloaded them I realized it was the kind of thing where you really had to be there to appreciate 

them so here are just a few

I'm a sucker for anyone who is in the military.  And for horses.

Girl Scouts dressed as cookie boxes.  Clever.

I'm also a sucker for guide dogs

Kristen's EvaJun was dancing with her dance studio.

We looked and looked but didn't see her. 

She is somewhere in there.

                                                        Old cars are cool.

The parade lasted much longer than we had anticipated so we left a bit early and 

headed off to find some lunch.

Lisa had the lobster fondue. Oh my word it was yummy.

I had the fish and chips.  Also yummy.

Right next door to the place we had lunch was this candle shop.

It was a really cool shop and you could make your own candles so Lisa and I decided to give it a try.  

It was so fun!

First you chose the colors wax you wanted.  We made a medium sized candle so we chose 3 colors each.

Then the really fun part. They had all these trinkets and charms that you picked out to put on top of your candle.  They had all sorts of charms and sea glass, shells and doo dads to choose from.  I think it took me a half an hour to pick out mine.  So many cute choices!

After you picked out your wax and your charms, they had you sit down at a table and they gave us little cutting boards and a putty knife and we cut our wax into little pieces.

After cutting up the wax we had to place our wax pieces in the candle mold.  You could put little bits of sea glass along the sides so they would show through when the candle was done.  Here's Lisa with her candle mold.

When the mold was filled with your wax pieces then you brought the candle up to the store keeper and she poured hot wax over the wax pieces.  The last step was to arrange the charms and shells and such on the top of the candle.  At this point she also added the fragrance of your choice. I chose white tea and Ginger.  It smelled so good.

These are all the things I picked out to put on top of my candle.

Here is the finished candle.  Isn't it pretty? I chose the large heart that says "gratitude" to remind me to be grateful for the things I have(even when I feel like I don't have a lot).  The angel says "wish" at the bottom.  I chose the small lotus flower just because I think Lotus flowers are pretty, and the sea glass and shells because we were at the beach.  The little heart represents my love for Joe.  That little tiny square rock kind of thing below the angel is some kind of mineral that is supposed to cleanse you of negativity.  I don't really buy into that sort of thing, but I'll take all the help I can get in that department so I stuck that in there too.

I forgot to take a picture of Lisa's finished candle.  Hers turned out very cute too.  They told us the candle would burn for 25 hours but it's too cute to burn and it smells good even when it's not burning so for now I am keeping it on my night stand.

After we made our candles we had to wait for them to harden so we walked around for  awhile and did some window shopping.  The weather was gorgeous.  It hit 80 degrees!

They have some cute little alleyways that are so quaint.  Love them.

Everyone was out enjoying the beautiful weather.

It was a perfect day.  

That night we headed to a slumber party at a friend's house with a bunch of childhood friends.  That's a whole other post.  

Let's just say a GREAT time was had by all. 

There may have even been some toilet papering going on, which is something I haven't done since I was 13 years old.  I'm not saying I was involved in that.  

I'm just saying it may have taken place at the party.   :0

That was the longest post ever.  I'm surprised if you made it all the way to the end of that!

It was a great weekend.