Happy Belated

On Friday, we got to escape to celebrate John's birthday (only a month late, but hey! it's the best we could do). It was well worth the wait! John is starting to feel a bit better from his surgery and back problems, the Holidays are over, the weather is perfect, and we were ready for a break!

Enter the Renaissance in Aliso Viejo

We had a relaxing drive down in the late morning, checked in to the hotel at noon (they were very nice to let us check in early) and then got some lunch at Native Foods which we were a bit hesitant about at first, but it was right next to the movie theater and we wanted something healthy. It was so good!!!

Then we saw "True Grit" because when you are on vacation, and it's 2:00 in the afternoon, you are able to do that. It was just us and a couple of elderly people in the whole stadium-seat theater. Nice!

Then we did some shopping, and went back to the hotel and worked out at the awesome gym.

Then we had dinner at the hotel's restaurant, Citrus (another super amazing delish hit), and ate outside near the fire pits listening to a live Reggae band. There were only adults near us. No children, no whining, no messes.

The quality of these photos above aren't the best as they were taken with a phone in the dark.

Here's a better shot:

The view from our room. Aliso Viejo is very hilly and you can see forever out towards Mission Viejo. The other direction had snow-capped mountains and the other was toward the ocean. Lovely!

On Saturday we slept in, lounged and reluctantly packed our bags. When we headed out for lunch we were both craving Native Foods again. Why not? Again, super good. Then we looked at model homes and headed out to Newport Beach to do some shopping at Fashion Island.

Thanks to grandma and grandpa, the kids were well taken care of and were ready for us to pick them up when we got home Saturday night. They were so exhausted that they fell immediately to sleep when we got home, which was yet another gift to us!

Happy Birthday John! I'm so glad we had this little getaway to recharge our batteries that have been so depleted in these last crazy couple of months.