iHavePhoneAgain.

Saturday was a jam-packed day but the highlight was the early afternoon Verizon store visit! The day finally came when I was up for my free iPhone4 upgrade! Got my phone and am back to being able to type properly and TAKE PICTURES! 

We spent the afternoon at the (pretty small) Alexandria food and wine festival. There were only about 6-7 food booths which surprised me. We tried a couple items. We had this really good chicken picatta like dish with mushroom/white wine orzo pasta. That was from Walker's Grill which I now really want to try out. I had a lamb thing with a cucumber sauce and pita bread from some gastropub place and had some ice stuff from Rita's.

I failed at taking any pictures of the booths or food but I did get a picture with this weird mascot thing. lol. love mascots.

We headed around the corner to walk around the Crate and Barrel Outlet for a bit as we waited for Lindsay and company to arrive. 

made sketchy take a picture with this cute apron lol. His beard is ABSURDICUS. He's trying to go to bachelor party as Zack Galifinakis (or however you spell that). So no shaving for 3 more weeks. sigh. 

We were done with the food items really quickly and the wine tent looked extremely crowded so we headed down to the waterfront area with Misha and Melanie. 

The waterfront area was super active (this picture doesn't show that)

We ended up eating at The Fish Market which was really huge and cute inside. They evidently also have live music every so often! The menu looked really good. I had a really amazing cream sauce pasta situation. 

After dinner, we swung by the festival to grab Lindsay who did the wine tasting event at the festival and headed out to grab Diana. Original plans were kickball party but instead we had a low key night of fun activities. We went bowling where we got schooled by an unsuspecting "i'm terrible at bowling" Lindsay and then played a couple rounds of putt putt (plan b to a very failed plan a). We were originally going to go see The Great Gatsby in Kingstowne. Our very trusty "movie theater" app thing in the car told us that there was a 9:30 showing. When we arrived and tried to buy tickets, the movie wasn't listed. After further investigation we realized how dumb all of us were -- it was a 9:30AM showing, lol. But really, why would that be LISTED if it was a time that already past?! Bad Chevy, BAD. 

Today we slept in and then I made an incredible buffalo chicken bake thing! So so good. Used two types of buffalo/wing sauce, fresh blue cheese, buffalo ranch dressing, chipotle panko bread crumbs. 

I also spent some time pinteresting which now has me definitely wanting to go to New Zealand (probably my number one international travel spot now). 

turquoise river

coromandel peninsula

terawera falls

golden bay

Also thought about two new aspects that would go really well with the whole northern shore wedding theme -- lighthouse and lanterns (with string lights or pretty candles in them). Also, Sketchy and I originally wanted to do table numbers as pictures of us with numbers 1-15... but then we started thinking about other ideas. We're thinking potentially pictures of us on different beaches and naming the tables beach names instead of numbers. 

This made me try to go back and look at fb albums and think about how many beaches I've visited. I'm at around 20-25 beaches that I have visited and have pictures at. Sketchy and I have only taken pictures at 5 beaches though -- and they're not the best pictures. Not sure if that will work out. BUT looking at all my old albums of vacations and high school days really made me homesick and esp since it's summertime. Sigh. Want to go to King's Dominion water park or this local Great Waves water park. Wish there were springs in this area.