Girls Trip to Pheonix

Last week Mary, Kecia, and I headed to sunny Arizona for a fun girls trip. Several months ago we decided that since we're all turning 30 this year (Kecia did last month and Mary, Brooke & I all do next month) that we needed to celebrate BIG! Who knew it would be so hard to coordinate the schedules of 4 busy moms to get away for a few days. Unfortunately, we only had one very small window when it didn't conflict with more than 2 of us and it still didn't work out for Brooke. We decided to go and PROMISED Brooke that we'd do it again. It wasn't quite the same without our usual foursome, but we did have fun and oh how it went by WAY too fast!

We flew out on Wednesday night. We had a few wrecky moments on our trip...starting with the airport. I won't bore you with the embarrassing details, but lets just say we got in some good exercise before our plane left! :)

Waiting to board our plane.

The funny part about our plane ride to Phoenix was that there was only 10 other people on the flight with us. None of them knew each other and sat alone with their lights off trying to get some rest, while the 3 of us sat right next to each other and talked the whole way there. I'm sure they wished we would have been a little quieter!

Mary's aunt and uncle have a gorgeous vacation home in Scottsdale and were kind enough to let us stay there for a few days. This is what we woke up to every day...

There is something about palm trees that make you feel like your far away on a tropical island.

We stayed up late talking and laughing ourselves to tears every night, but became quite frustrated that our aging bodies wouldn't let us sleep past 8 o'clock. So what do you do when you're day starts early and have no schedule or any kids to take care of?? You shop, and eat, and shop some more! And that's what we did...for 3 days!

We stopped at Paradise Bakery to fuel up for a day of shopping. (Have you ever had their breakfast croissant?? NEVER order a whole one by yourself! Trust me.)

Somehow I got nominated to be the driver for the trip so me and "Vicki" (our GPS) became pretty tight! She was a HUGE help in navigating us to all our shopping and eating destinations. We would have never survived the trip without her. How I miss her soothing voice!

We spent about 5 hours in this mall and still never saw even half of it. It was HUGE!

We found great accessories every where we went. These glasses were a favorite.

Kecia and I modeling these really cute coats we found for a great deal. She bought the cute green one and I REALLY wanted this blue one, but I think we're together too much to have that similar of a coat...so I found a different one instead!

Our shopping damage after one day! Our motto for the trip quickly became "You can always return it!"

After a full day of shopping we worked up a good appetite for some yummy mexican food. We picked a random restaurant and hoped we wouldn't regret it. We picked this one because the menu listed a creamy spinach queso...it was delish!
After dinner we went to see the movie Secret Life of Bees. I read the book a few years ago and have been wanting to go see it. It was really good. We had a good cry and missed our kids and then got over it with a visit to Coldstone!

We took lots of random pictures of ourselves while waiting for the movie to start...

Most of them were of this nature!

The next morning we woke up and had a poolside breakfast in our jammies before getting ready and heading out for the day. Before we left we took some more pictures...(between the 3 of our cameras, we didn't miss a moment of this trip!)

We met up with Jill, one of Mary's old college room mates, for lunch at the cutest little girly cafe. The food was so good (my favorite meal of the trip!). We were entertained by nearby guests with botox injected lips, a group wearing matching shirts, and Jill's scary knife moment! :) It was really fun and I'm glad I got to meet Jill, what a fun girl!

Kecia, Mary, Me & Jill

After lunch we drove a little ways to Tempe where we heard we'd find some good outlet shopping. (thanks for the tip, Linds!). This mall was huge as well. If you walk the whole inside of it, its a mile. We didn't get through all of this one either, but we did find some great deals and checked a few things off our Christmas lists!

That night we had dinner at PF Changs.

Immediately following our meal at PF Changs, we may or may not have drove to Red Robin for dessert (oh and maybe some fries, too!).

We did stop to take a picture of Mary on the Jazzy. I know its hard to tell in any of these pictures, but dear Mary is 7 months pregnant and kept up with us the whole time. We put some serious miles on our shoes and she didn't need that jazzy for a minute. It would have been fun to roll into some of those stores on it though...Anthro, Great Indoors, even Paddy O'Furniture!! :)

The next day we had our last big shopping extravaganza. There is this store called Last Chance where you can find all sorts of name brand items marked WAY down. Some have been previously worn, others have small flaws, but you have to dig through a lot of junk to find anything good. So we headed there in the morning and lined up with LOTS of other people waiting for the store to open. This is what the crowd looked like when we got there.

Kecia was REALLY excited to run the floors!

I did walk away with a pair of shoes and 2 pair of jeans all for only $30! It was fun just to see what it was and experience the mayhem. Mary had a front row seat of people leaving the store with what they thought was a good find.


It was really hard to pack up our belongings (in the extra bags we had to buy to fit everything!) and head home. It was such a fun trip and it came to an end all too quickly. We left in the dirtiest, smokiest, grossest taxi ever and headed to the airport.

Love you girls!! Thanks for such a fun trip. I'd go again in a heart beat.
(Brooke, we already have big plans for the next trip!!)

(A HUGE thank you to Tucker for knowing how much I needed this trip and turning it into such a fun weekend for you and the kids. I don't think they missed me a bit!)

**If anyone besides Mary & Kecia is still reading this...I'm impressed!**