Bachelorette Party Part 1 - Extreme Hiking & 81 Tacos

Hello! I feel like it has been forever since I last checked in with you. I hope you had a fun Super Bowl Sunday yesterday 🙂

My bachelorette party was a huge success. Steph, my maid of honor, could seriously be an event planner. She is super organized, creative and fun! She planned us the perfect long weekend in Scottsdale and everyone had a great time. Thanks for everything, Steph! 🙂

I flew into Scottsdale with Walter’s sister, Katherine and cousin, Christine. When we arrived Steph, Julia, Rachel and Britt (college friends) had already arrived from NYC and Kelsey (work friend) was already in Scottsdale on business. When we arrived they had already gone grocery shopping and decorated the condo we were staying at with “Team Bride” balloons and a bachelorette banner.

Steph also made us little goodie bags and the cutest personalized sunglasses. Mine said my name on one side and “Bride” on the other. The other girls had their names on one said and “LJs Nauti Crew” on the other – very clever, nautical bachelorette theme that turned into our hashtag for the weekend!

For dinner we grilled up some burgers and then got ready to head out into Old Town, Scottsdale for the night. It is a really fun, little town with tons of bars and restaurants. We ended up at Whiskey Row and we were the ONLY girls there. About 2 weeks ago we figured out there was a big golf tournament in town this weekend so the male/female ratio was about 100/1. We saw about a million bachelor parties, so basically we didn’t pay for any of our drinks all weekend 🙂 This was supposed to be our “chill” night out, but it got pretty rowdy. We loved the music, so we got in a lot of dancing. The last of our little crew, Sarah, flew in from Boston after work and met us out at the bar!

Friday morning we woke up and made breakfast before heading out for our hike up Camelback Mountain. It was an awesome hike, but it was a little more intense than most of us were anticipating. About half way up I said to Steph “did you know it was going to be this extreme” her response, “yeah, kinda”… thanks for the warning! Haha. It really was a fun hike though, I love a challenge and the views from the top were spectacular!

Just in case our matching sunglasses and plaid shirts didn’t make us stand out enough, we also wore our ring pops on the hike! We did have to abandon them half way up though when we realized we needed our hands for rock scaling!

We climbed up on the Cholla Trail, which is supposed to be the easier side and opted for the Echo Canyon Trail on the way back down because, although it is steeper, it is shorter! With just a few slips and trips we made it safely to the bottom where we hopped on a trolley that took us into Old Town. If you are ever in Scottsdale and looking for a free tour, hop on a trolley. Our driver gave us the run down on everything Scottsdale and recommended we try out The Sugar Bowl for a late lunch.

Naturally lunch ended with this 🙂 The Spectacular Banana Bowl

Afterwards we headed back to the condo to relax before it was time to get ready to go to dinner at Diego Pops, a Mexican restaurant not too far from our condo.

It was quite an experience to say the least… Steph had preplanned the menu so no one would have to deal with the check at the end. We sat down and they had these really cute menus printed for us…

they were apparently just for decoration though, because we did not get this at all. It took a long while for them to bring out anything. The waitress asked if we were ready to order and we were all like, “um, we thought we already did”… a very confused waitress went over to the hostess to see if she knew anything about our menu and she came back and said “the chef said your food is almost ready, but he’s not sure”… excuse me? What do you mean he’s not sure?… All of a sudden trays and trays and TRAYS of tacos emerged from the kitchen, multiple waiters were bringing them out and it got to the point where we did not have any room on our tables so they were just handing them to us to hold… Everyone was hysterically laughing at this point, was this a joke?! Finally Steph said “please make it stop” and we were able to turn away 2 trays. 81 tacos – 9 tacos per person – somehow that is the order that was conveyed to the kitchen, no wonder the chef “wasn’t sure” about our order! The manager came over and apologized saying that he had a concussion and had been sitting in a dark room when the chef was texting him about our dinner so he just answered “yes” to all of the chef’s questions – LOL – probably not what you want to tell your customers, but hilarious end to the story, right? Ultimately we ended up eating less than 1/2 of the tacos. We contemplated wrapping them up and bring them out with us to the bar to trade for drinks, but we thought that might be a little too messy 😉