Some weekends are just perfect aren’t they? Often it’s the unplanned and spontaneous, but sometimes the ones you organise turn out to be just the way you planned.
It was our 6th wedding anniversary last Saturday and, in previous years, I’ve relied on the husband to arrange a surprise for me, but this year I took the reins.
We’ve been staying at my ever patient parents whilst the our house renovation has been going on, so a night away, just the three of us really appealed. We had a million house jobs to do over the weekend, so staying local was key, so we decided on a night away at The Brooklands Hotel (who kindly had us for the night free of charge) for their Brooklands Museum Discovery Break (£199 - full details here), I've written about when we lasted visited here, if you fancy a read which gives a full tour of the room. As it was a special weekend they also upgraded us to one of their beautiful suites, which meant Sophie could sleep in a a separate part of the suite as she doesn’t sleep very well when sharing a room with us! There was also loads of space for her to play in and she loved the noughts and crosses game in the room which we played endless rounds of!
As Sophie had an afternoon nap, the three of us went for dinner at 6.30pm, as kids eat free as part of the package. Sophie dined off the kids menu and was an absolute dream. I often find she is really well behaved in the situations I worry about most (and a devil when I expect her to be good!!) She chatted, ate, coloured and watched some of her programs on the iPad whilst we enjoyed 3 courses of amazing food.
We both had the scallops and shared the chateaux briande - both of which were utterly delicious, before indulging further in pudding.
We then put S to bed and chilled out on our balcony enjoying the rest of the evening together. Sophie slept like an absolute jem in her travel cot (which I’d been really worried about as we’d only just made the love into a big girl bed) and we all had tea in bed before the husband went to the gym and then we all headed down to brekkie.
The package also includes a ticket to The Brooklands Museum, where we looked around cars, bikes and planes from yesteryears along with a trip to the soft play. Our favourite part was looking round The Sultan of Oman's former private jet which was gifted to Brooklands museum in 1987. Sophie sat in the pilots set (as did Gareth!) pretending to fly the plane.
We also had great fun in the interactive gallery playing on the racing car games, and lots of sciences based activities.
Then it was on to carpet decisions, Choosing grout colours and kitchen details….
On Saturday evening my parents were back on babysitting duty and I took Gareth to No 97 in Surbiton - one of my favourite local-ish restaurants. I kept my phone in my bag and camera at home, but you can see lots of lovely pics on their website.They have a menu that changes monthly and we had one of my favourite seats at the bar over looking the kitchen. The restaurant has a brilliant atmosphere and sitting at the bar makes it even more of an experience. The food is divine and I think really reasonable a £25 for two courses or £30 for three with an amuse bouche and petit fours making it feel like a banquet. We ate, sipped, laughed and enjoyed each others company, thinking how quickly the last six years have flown by and how excited we are about what our 7th year together has in store.