Anniversary Road Trip

By: Mallory Jordan, moderately crafty

November is a very exciting month for me. Not only because I celebrated my birthday with my last post; but, because exactly one week later I have another personal news story to blog about. Today is my 1 year anniversary with Mr. Justin Tillery. I am very giddy today because we are both celebrating our longest and most meaningful relationship. So, bear with me with the self-centered posts. After this week, I will go back to being more news worthy with my crafts.

Men are sometimes hard to buy for. Women have stereotypical gifts that most of us like such as perfume, lotion, candy, flowers, jewelry, a nice dinner and the list goes on. Men tend to be slightly more picky in the gift department. When I was struggling with what item I could get Justin that is both meaningful and something he would like, I remembered one of my mom's many mottos: sometimes the best gift is going and actually doing something to make new memories on a special day.

 Last spring semester, Justin was in London for a study abroad program for 3 months. During that time, he visited Germany and the famous Hofbrauhaus. He bought his dad a Stein  Maß beer mug and he has wanted one every since. Lucky for me, not only is there a Hofbrauhaus now in Chicago (a 4 1/2 hour trip), but now there is one 2 1/2 hours away in Newport, Kentucky! Although I knew the one in Kentucky would not be as awesome as Hofbrauhaus in Germany, I took a chance. The Newport Hofbrauhaus still has great reviews and we loved it!

There are a lot of fun things to do around the Newport Hofbrauhaus, so I made a small Google Map to chart out where our anniversary adventures could take us. That way, we could make a nice day out of our trip.

 

I took us there on Saturday and bought drinks and Justin his own beer mug. Naturally, I had to use my crafty skills to make the trip a little extra cute and special. For some reason, Justin loves trying to guess what his gifts are. So, I made a game out of it. The 1 year anniversary is the year of paper gifts. Although there are many different ideas for 1 year gifts, I had my own already planned.

Justin knew we were going on a special road trip, but I didn't tell him where. I decided to make 9 clues that got progressively easier. He got one every 12 miles of the trip to help him guess where we were going. I wrote the clues in cursive and added some heart details to be mushy about it.

Wait, this picture is missing something. You need to seal it with a kiss!

 

The first clues were very vague clues about the city we were going to. For instance, the first clue was that we were traveling south. The last clues were more specific about the place. I made sure to seal each of the envelopes with a kiss and number the outsides accordingly.

 

Overall, it was a great day. Not only did Justin get a present, but we got to make more memories together and he had the fun of guessing along the way.