The pre-wedding festivities continued this past weekend with my Bachelorette Party down here in Florida! With tropical storm Hermine very quickly making her way into the Gulf Coast we were all pretty nervous we would be spending our beach weekend inside. However, lucky for us, the storm came in right next to us on the East side of the panhandle and we miraculously ended up with sunshine all weekend long and two perfect beach days on top of that!

While it’s normally tradition to have the Bachelorette Party much closer to the actual wedding date, with a majority of all my friends being the brilliant ladies they are and attending grad school, having it on Labor Day Weekend made the most sense. Almost all of my closest friends from all parts of my life were able to make it and we had an absolute blast!

 The weekend started on Thursday when all the ladies arrived to town in the late afternoon. As the official “Bachelorette Weekend” activities didn’t start until Friday, we decided to host a BBQ at our house with the girls plus a large group of our friends from here at Hurlburt. It was nice to be able to introduce some of my friends form home  and all parts of my life to some of our Air Force friends as well.

For the weekend, everyone received adorable little beach buckets all with their names on them. In each beach bucket was a monogram beach tank, flamingo bottle openers, matching coozies, and all the essentials you’d need for a beach weekend (advil, razor, chapstick, gum). The theme for the weekend was “Let’s Flamingle!”- My Maid of Honor, Hannah, and good friend, Kelly, did an awesome job making that theme come to life through decorations, food, even our little gift buckets were filled with flamingos and pineapples!

Kelly is one of the craftiest people I know! She makes beautiful works of art with her amazing handwriting. She even has her own ETSY shop. If you’re looking for a new piece of art for your home, have a favorite scripture, or need a beautiful hand-written sign for something, check out her shop!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/wordsbykel

Friday was beach day #1! There was sunshine the entire day, though the water was a bit rough due to the nearby storm, we didn’t all feel comfortable going in, so it was a hot one!

Friday night was spent at a casual beach bar for drinks, live music, and dinner. We were by far the youngest people at the bar by about 25-30 years when we arrived, but the band loved it and played all my favorite songs 🙂 We went home afterwards to enjoy our dessert bar, quickly downed some large pitchers of margaritas, and spent time catching up/playing games. It was a fun night in before we really hit the town the next evening!

Saturday was beach day #2 and was even better than the first! The water was a bit more calm today so we all got to jump in together and cool off. We had lots of ingredients for Mimosas left over so we packed the cooler with champagne, orange juice, and maybe some food too?  We headed back a little early that day to have enough time for everyone to get showered and glammed up for a night in Destin!

All afternoon, Hannah had kept telling me we needed to be ready by 5pm. I didn’t understand, because I had thought the original plan was to have the boys drive us into Destin. My thought was “hey, if they have to wait 10 minutes.. that’s okay!” But what I didn’t know is that Conor had been in contact with Hannah for a little while now and he had reserved a huge hummer limo for us to take into Destin! Everyone else knew that day except for me, so finally when it was time to go they all made me come outside and there was this giant limo parked right in front of my home! I was shocked! I also had given them all the credit for it at first, but they then let me know that it was Conor who did it. Man… I’ve got a good one.

 It’s about a 40 minute drive to Destin from my house, not including traffic, so we definitely got some good use out of the limo! With our favorite drinks in hand, music blasting through the speakers, and just a slight wardrobe malfunction on my part we definitely had a great ride to dinner!

Once we arrived at the Destin harbor we walked around, got a pre-dinner drink, and then enjoyed an awesome meal at Jackacudas. It was my first time there so I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but it was delicious! The entire night was filled with lots of fun, laughter, drinks, bar hopping, and we ended the night with lots of dancing at AJs!

Everyone headed home on Sunday- exhausted! But we had an absolutely wonderful weekend! I was so happy to be able to show off this awesome new place I get to call home. I had an amazing time with some of my most favorite ladies (missing a few), and can’t wait to continue the celebrations in the next month!