5 Year Celebration - Part II

Remember in this post when I said I would love to stay in the same place we spent our wedding night again sometime? Well, I didn't know it, but I was foreshadowing part of our 5 year celebration. After the dinner train, we headed out toward the interstate. I didn't know where we were going, but I was hoping that maybe we wouldn't make it all the way to the interstate, but would turn into the hotel we had our reception and spent our wedding night at. I held my breath as we approached the hotel, waiting to see if we would turn in or continue on to somewhere else. Well, right at the last second, Derek ducked into the turn lane and and made a right turn into the hotel! I was so excited I gave a double fist pump.

I walked into the lobby without Derek because he left something in the car. I was going to wait for him to check in, but the people at the desk were looking at me expectantly, so I went ahead and gave them our last name. The guy typed it in and replied, "Happy anniversary, Mrs. Warnick. I see you had your reception here 5 years ago. Happy 5 years." I tell ya, they sure do make you feel special. Then he said, "I see you have already paid for your stay with points." (Side note - we have a Marriott rewards card so we get points when we buy stuff and then get to stay at Marriotts for free - so Derek used our points to score us a free room - which made me really happy!) He then said, "We have you staying in the presidential tonight." At this point I was super excited excited. The presidential suite! At that point Derek walked in. The guy at the desk gave us our keys and said we were staying in room 722. The 7th floor is the top floor where all the suites are. Derek didn't know we had gotten the presidential suite. Apparently you can't reserve a suite with points, so Derek just reserved a regular room, and when he talked to the Marriott people he told them it was our anniversary and that we had our reception and stayed there on our wedding night, so they upgraded us to a golf course view room, and said that if there were any suites available when we checked in they would upgrade us. (He later told me to stay in a suite would be $699 for the night, so he just used the points, and I was so glad that he did. He definitely knows me well and knows that I would rather stay in a regular room for free than a suite for 700 bucks.) So when Derek saw we were on the 7th floor, he got super excited.

We headed up the elevator to our room. And it wasn't the exact same room we stayed on our wedding night - it was better! Here are some photos:

I really liked the little steps up into the bed.

I'm not sure why this next picture is so off-centered and crooked, but it's still cool :)

So there's a little tour of the presidential suite for you. After checking out how awesome the room was we sat on the balcony and talked for a while, and then exchanged gifts. The five year anniversary is supposed to be the wood anniversary, and we don't really go crazy with gifts, so I decided to get Derek a WoodWick candle.

Apparently Derek had the same idea, because we got each other the exact same thing, scent and all. We ended the evening by watching our entire wedding video. We haven't watched the entire thing for a really long time. It was so fun to watch the whole thing though, and it's crazy how much has changed in 5 years. I honestly felt a little sad at the end, I'm not really sure why, maybe just because of how time is flying by and things have changed, it was just kind of weird. But it was also really happy at the same time because I remembered how much fun I had that day.

Ok, I'm going to stop here and save the last part of our celebration for Part III. Thanks for letting me describe this 24 hours in detail :)