The Great Long Weekend

Good morning & happy Monday!
 

Can we just talk about how great this past weekend was? I had a few vacation days that needed to be used up before the end of the year, so it went from a two day weekend to a three and a half day weekend and it was the best. It was definitely a weekend of all the things.
 

One of my maids of honor, who lives about an 11.5 hour car drive away from me, was passing through North Carolina this weekend. We picked a city {Asheville} and planned for a quick overnight trip there to hang out and to take a million selfies.
 

We caught a gorgeous sunset at Grove Park Inn.

Inside GPI, we somehow snagged two rocking chairs directly in front of the fireplace Like, saw these from across the room and raced over to grab them before anyone else spotted them.


 

It was so cold while we were there. 25 degrees + a windchill? This is why I live in Columbia.


 

We parted ways Friday morning after a delicious breakfast at Tupelo Honey, but since I had the whole day off on a week day with nothing to do... I continued my North Carolina road trip and headed to Charlotte to visit my old job & coworkers.



I hightailed it back home from Charlotte to meet up with a few other couples to visit my favorite Christmas tradition: Riverbanks Lights at the Zoo!



On Saturday, Patrick and I had every intention of being productive and getting a lot of Christmas present shopping knocked out. Well. We bought a grand total of 5 things after 5 hours of shopping: two presents for family members, a bar cart for us, some fun lights to go on the bar cart, and a new piece of furniture for our dining room.

New bar cart:


{similar bar cart found here}

New glass cabinet from my favorite furniture shop, Carolina Imports:



Now we can finally unpack all of our wedding china & our fancy presents because they've got a place to go! Can't say that Patrick is excited about that, but he's excited to get rid of a couple dozen boxes out of our basement.

On Sunday, we had brunch with two of our friends and then spent the unseasonably warm {80 degrees!} afternoon at Swamp Cabbage Brewery which was hosting the Bierkeller Columbia Pop Up Brewery this month.





We ended the weekend with a drive around a neighboring town looking at all of the Christmas lights and dinner with Patrick's family... including Amy, who is finally home for Christmas :)

Anybody else need a weekend to recover from their weekend, or is it just me?