Our One Year Anniversary

Dana, Rocky, and I just got back from our one year anniversary vacation at Catalina Island.  It was such a nice and relaxing weekend spent together as a family and for such a great celebration.  I still can't believe one year has already arrived, it seems like it has just begun!  For those of you who aren't familiar with Catalina Island, here is a map to show you where we were.

We drove up to Dana Point on Saturday to catch the noon ferry over to Catalina.  Dana and I sat on top of the boat, outside, thinking we got the best seats in the house, but once we began the journey we quickly realized that while the sight was beautiful, the wind made for a very chilly ride.  Regardless, we were really happy with our seats because we were hoping to see some dolphins or whales, but no such luck (although, we did see dolphins on our way home--so cool!).  Here we are on the boat, just arriving to the island.

Once we got to the island, it was time to unload and check out the town.  Alot of what Catalina has to do is walking around the town and boardwalk, eating good food, and checking out the cute little shops.  Being that we had Rocky with us, we had to be creative in how we would manage our time so that he wasn't couped up in our room the whole time.  The weather was perfect, warm enough for tank tops and shorts, but not too hot to enjoy a nice walk.  We toured the town on foot most of the time.

We also took advantage of all the great food.  They had a great array of different restaurants, considering it was such a small town, and ice cream shops on every corner.  Dana and I thought it would be a good idea to treat ourselves to ice cream after every meal, but we ended up eating too much to even fit any room for the good stuff...so we only had ice cream twice on our trip, and ended it with a couple carmeled apple treats.  Yummy!  You can see below why we didn't have room for dessert on our first night.

Sunday was our official anniversary day, so we planned a whole day of celebration.  We started it off with a long morning walk with our little furry son, Rocky, stopping to squeeze in half a game of mini-golf.  We had to leave after hole 9 for we then had an appointment for a couple's massage at our hotel.  We were pampered with facials and massages which made us both so relaxed and rejuvenated.  Carrying on with our relaxed energy, we went back to our rooms and grabbed the gifts that we got each other and a part of our wedding cake that my mom froze and sent to us for our anniversary.  We were excited to carry on the tradition of eating some of your wedding cake on your one year anniversary to bring us good luck and happiness for all the years to follow.  We all hung out in our hotel's courtyard and dove in to the cake.

The cake was actually in the tupperware bowl you see us eating from (we couldn't get it out)...and the hotel had no utensils, so we have to use our hands.  It made the memory that much more fun.  :)  To our surprise, the cake wasn't bad at all.  Still tasted like it did that day, except the fondant was a little gooey, so we had to work around it.  After getting a few good bites out of the cake, we exchanged gifts, which we decided to keep traditional.  The One Year Anniversary Gift theme is Paper.  Being such a broad theme, it was interesting to see how differently we thought.  I chose to paint a watercolor hummingbird painting for Dana and framed it with a personal message on back of the frame for him.  Dana bought me a blank cookbook which gives me spaces to save all of our favorite recipes.  I love it!

After exchanging our gifts, we really wanted to go on a guided bus tour around the city of Avalon (the main city on the island) to learn more about the history of the town and get a better idea of what it all had to offer.  Not sure we got what we wanted out of the tour, but it was fun to ride around together and see the different sites that we missed on foot.

We ended our night by eating dinner at Steve's Steakhouse, which we both thoroughly enjoyed.  The service was fabulous and we got the best seats in the house, overlooking the water with a window seat.  We both loved our food, we had great conversations, then finished the night off with a walk through town to find the best ice cream around :)

We have so many memories and good pictures to share from our weekend, but I don't want to ramble on in our blog, so feel free to check out the album from our trip to check out all our adventures.  Click here to see all the pictures.