The Presidential Suite

So Chris and Nalani's sister Liana totally hooked up Ali and I for our wedding night.  As we pulled up to the Newport Beach Marriot we were looking forward to our suite that we were getting for a good deal. Side note, it was so much fun walking into the hotel in my wedding dress and Ali in what was left of his tux after busting all those moves and having every person that saw us say "congrats," it felt like so surreal.  Back to the story...Alas upon check in we heard the most spectacular words you can hear when checking in "Ok we have you upgraded to the Presidential Suite."  The next thought was "score!"  First of all we couldn't find the room because you have to take a different elevator that was nestled in a corner and use your room key to get up there since not everyone is allowed up on that floor.  Then as we were finally made it to the top floor we were walking down the hallway and spotted a door that looked bigger than all the others.  At first Ali thought it was the exit door to the stairwell, but no it was the door to our room!

We had a dining room,

a kitchen of sorts, 

a living room,

a tub with a view,

a bedroom

and an incredible balcony with an ocean view...this room was amazing!

These photos don't really do it justice.  It felt really classy and cool and you gotta love that we got married at the Nixon Library and then stayed in the Presidential Suite....I will take themes for a thousand Alex....

Minimoon

First and foremost welcome to "our" blog.  I say "our" because let's be real, clearly Ali won't be blogging on here at all.  Anyways, onto the actual purpose of this post....

With school and work and all we couldn't honeymoon or even minimoon after the wedding.  Finally spring break arrived(yay!) and we were able to sneak in a minimoon in Asheville and more importantly at the Biltmore.  (We are planning a more official honeymoon-esque trip to Europe for next summer).

We headed to Asheville on a Tuesday and enjoyed a casual evening of dinner and a movie.  It was great considering I can't remember the last movie date we had.

Here we are at dinner the first night...clearly we are still perfecting that whole self portrait with the ipod.

The next morning we awoke to rainy and very cold weather.  We bundled up and headed to the science museum(the cool kid inside of me can never resist them).  After being pelted with rain we made it to the museum which turned out to not be all that great, but we still had fun.

I blew up a cave and Ali got to be a weatherman.  With the weather being so terrible Ali persuaded me to go to the mall where he surprised me with a little shopping trip...yay for bad weather.  After that we wrapped our evening up with some dinner and netflix.  The next day we headed the Biltmore Estate.  This was by far my favorite part of the trip.  The staff at the hotel upgraded our room and continually referred to me as "Mrs. Mansour" (so much fun to the newlywed girl.)  We checked in early and took the shuttle over to the house.

In front of the house.

In the conservatory....with the candlestick....haha going through the estate made me feel like I was in the middle of a game of Clue.  After we toured the house we went back to the hotel and ate a relaxing lunch with a beautiful view.

Then we got massages and headed out to dinner later that night.

It was so cute they put chocolates on our pillows and even sent us a free bottle of champagne with a happy wedding note.

We finished out the trip with some yummy room service breakfast and snow outside.

Overall, a very happy minimoon!