As many of you know, I am a big fan of getaways. I really believe that a little downtime every so often is very important to our health and sanity. It doesn’t need to be a full blown vacation, just a couple days away from the every day routine ?
I love to go on romantic weekend getaways with my husband. I also love to go on weekend camping getaways … we sort of unplug and enjoy nature, naps, board games and yummy food.
So each year, I plan a girls getaway with my friend Kari. We’ve been doing it for about 10 years now. It’s usually a 3-day weekend that usually (but not always) includes a women’s conference. Then we do some touristy things before and after ward. We look forward to it every year.
This year our scheduled getaway weekend was in the middle of April. We made our reservations for the conference and the hotel last November. We were looking forward to Springtime getaway.
The Thursday before we left, it was 72 degrees & sunny here in Chicagoland! The forecast for the weekend in Green Bay was sunny and mild for Friday, drizzle & rain for Saturday, and rain possibly turning to flurries for Sunday. The conference was Friday night & Saturday morning. We had plans to take a cheese & wine tasting Saturday afternoon and tour Lambeau field (Kari is a Packer fan) Sunday morning before heading home.
On the ride up, we were talking about how nice it was going to be to relax and unwind. Then we got to reminiscing about our other trips and that, in hindsight, they were great fun, but not really relaxing. We always booked things to do and see while we were away. This weekend didn’t look to be any different from the others in that respect. Someday we would go somewhere to just unwind and relax …
When it was time to head over to the conference (a block away from the hotel) we noticed it had started drizzling, a little earlier than predicted, but not a big deal because we had already enjoyed the mild, sunny day. When we walked out of the conference center, it was a horrible sleet/hail storm. The one block walk back to the hotel seemed to take forever as we walked into high winds and pellets of ice stinging our faces.
We woke up to more than a foot of snow … what happened to rain turning to flurries on Sunday afternoon? The second day of the conference was cancelled, airports were closed, the city was at a standstill. It looked like we were getting a relaxing weekend after all.
That’s a lot of snow!!
They were reporting a lull in the snowfall for a few hours, so Kari & I braved the elements and walked the block back toward the conference center to a restaurant for some lunch and get some food to go for later (no full service restaurant in the hotel). Even though it wasn’t technically snowing, the it so windy, the blowing snow made it seem like we were walking in a snowstorm. It was like mountain climbing to get over the piles of snow from the snowplows just to cross the street, but we made it. Out of 5 possible places to eat, only 1 was open. Once we got back to the hotel we heard they were predicting at least another foot of snow accompanied with even higher winds, an actual blizzard, for tomorrow.
We decided to stay another day, and I’m so glad we did. We woke up to howling winds and practically no visibility. We were stuck, we were talking to our maid and she was saying how the whole shift from yesterday had to stay overnight and woke again because no one could get to work or get home.
We spent the day relaxing in the hot tub, did a little workout in the gym, watched a movie, sat around the fireplace in the lobby talking to our fellow stranded travelers. Then we went to bed early to get a good night’s rest, we had an hour or more of digging out our car in the morning
No one is going out this door!
You can hardly tell that we have a black car.
Snowy Selfie 🙂
It looks like we got a relaxing weekend after all.?