wedding weekend home base!

we finally made it to the Fairmont Newport Beach to see if it would be a good, i mean, great hotel for our out of town friends and family....

and it was!  for all you coastal orange county brides out there, here's a little bit about this hotel:

the Fairmont NB recently completed a $32 million renovation.  it offers 440 luxury guest rooms, including 54 suites, most featuring over-sized soaking tubs.  all rooms include marble entries, 32" LCD HDTVs, DVDs and Bose sound systems.  the new fitness center features state of the art Techno Gym equipment with built in LCD monitors.  it is conveniently located right down the street from John Wayne airport, and about 10 mins from coastal Newport Beach.

now that i've given you the hotel's run down of their property, let me tell ya what i think! honestly from the second you step foot in the lobby, it feels very tropical, but upscale too.  their staff seems to be very eager to help and is quite accommodating (and we didn't even spend more than an hour at the hotel)!  the rooms are beautiful, they are giving us a fab rate ($149), since it's meant to appeal to business men, the rates go down over weekends, giving us a waaay better deal than what we were quoted at the nearby NB Marriott or the Island Hotel!

the best part, we set up our room block, and they don't put in an "attrition" clause; meaning that if we ask for 30 rooms to be blocked and only 20 are picked up by our guests, we don't have to pay for those extra 10 rooms we didn't need! make sure when planning your room blocks that your hotel doesn't make you do this!

and without further ado.. snapshots for you visual enjoyment

bamboo restaurant

pool & cabanas

high tech gym overlooking pool area (for inspiration!)

lobby - very tropical... i like

exterior - valet entrance

guest room

and honestly these picks do not do the place justice!

Welcome Baskets

i ran across some great priced buckets yesterday at Wal Mart of all places! and it got me thinking that i need to be looking for larger buckets (sand moving size) to hold all of our hotel guests' welcome goodies.  here are some images of wedding welcome basket ideas...

here are some of my initial ideas of what will go into our "welcome buckets": 

• Water bottle per person (it's hot in CA in august)
• Some type of Balance or Cliff bars (a good snack/ meal replacement when people are on the go)... gotta be heathy
• some of our favorite candies (tootsie pops, sour patch, 
• maybe some lindt truffles (i LOVE them)
• maybe a starbucks card?? who doesn't love them??
• trail mix or some type of snack nuts
• crackers
• packet of tissues
• sunscreen 
• playing cards
• local area map of Newport and Laguna Beach
• local are guides
• a wedding weekend timeline ( so guests know where to be and when)
• a contact list of important phone numbers 
• a letter of thanks from the FI and I

here's a site where  you can find mini/individual sized items that would be great in welcome gifts... MINIMUS

basically the point of the baskets is to inform guests of important details, as well as provide them with goodies to snack on or spoil themselves with!

the plan will be to drop them off at the hotel front desk the day before everyone gets in, that way the items will be in their rooms before they get in their rooms!

anyone planning to do the same for their out of towners?... any really original ideas to include for guests in the baskets? i'd love something a little more original!

My Valentine

so my dad gave me my valentine's gift a little early, but i'm pretty sure i'm gonna love this gift and use it for a very long time!

thanks dad...

well it wasn't jewelry, candy, or a cute stuffed animal, no... it was a computer program! maybe to the average girl it might have been received with a yawn, but i'm not your average girl.

Bento is a personal database program, which will help so much for organizing my real estate business contacts, jewelry company contacts, friends and family, MOST IMPORTANTLY manage my guest list.  the latter was the main reason he picked it up on his trip to the Apple store.  i've been wanting to send my save the dates (STDs, it sounds terrible i know!) since about the ohhh... the day i got them from magnet street  but i needed a way to print the labels with all the addresses i've been stockpiling.  i had been keeping a database spreadsheet with all this important info, and when i couldn't figure out the best way to print the labels, i called my handy dandy local Apple store. what did i find out? oh, that none of the programs on my 1 month old laptop would help! $1000 for this.... as i was about to start grumbling...

dad to the rescue, he tells me about this great new software Filemaker came out with, called Benito??? well that same handy dandy apple store guy kindly corrected us and said it's called Bento, and yes it would be very helpful in solving my problem.

i'll update once i've spent time working with it, and give feed back about the program, but i'm pretty sure it'll suit me just fine!