Bachelorette in the Burbs

I feel guilty blogging about one friend's bachelorette weekend and skipping over another equally fun one, so it's time to play a little catch up.  One of my high school besties tied the knot in Oklahoma City in April, so a couple of weeks before her big day, her girlfriends from Dallas, Fort Worth, and Oklahoma City all met in neutral territory- Grapevine, Texas, Murica.  Isn't she a gorgeous bride?

If you're a North Texas local (or an Oklahoman, which is pretty much the same thing), you know Grapevine for the mall Grapevine Mills.  For high school kids in OKC, one of the really cool things you might get do on a special occasion was to take a weekend trip here.  I have literally come to this destination as a "vacation".  My parents tricked me into thinking this was fabulous.  Now, another thing this area is also locally famous for is its wineries.  (I didn't say the wine is good.  It's just wine.  No one's complaining.)  I don't know which came first for the city: the name or the vineyards. There's an annual wine festival (happening next weekend) and any time you can tour the wineries.

For this particular trip, our group stayed at the Gaylord Texan.  My first time to stay here was New Year's Eve in 2010, which was a solid good time.  The weekend started off with (what else?) a group dinner.  I was in it to win it this weekend, so when the majority of the group decided to call it an early night after dinner, we (the cool kids) had a little dance party in our room.

The next day we did normal things and had a Pinterest-style bridal shower in a suite at the hotel and played cheesy wedding games. 

After the shower, it was on to the wine tour, which started way too early in the day.  There were three stops to be made on this tour and I'm not sure how the entire group (close to twenty of us) lasted.  There was a little drama at dinner (the last stop on the tour), so I was proud of us- it wasn't BIG drama like I'd expected.  Of course you have the one friend who is entirely too drunk, then you have the friend(s) trying way too hard to look after her.  You have the really loud drunk chicks, and you have a few people who just sit at the table looking away pretending they're not with the group when it's painfully obvious that they are (why else would they be sitting at the table?).  The bride herself is an easy going peace-maker type and I was a quiet observer.  Here are some pics in chronological order.  I'll let you use your imagination to come up with captions.

I  have to give a shout out to our "sommeliers" at one of the tasting rooms.  How cute are these sassy ladies in their bling tees! 

The place to be and be seen in Grapevine is a club called The Glass Cactus, so of course we had our bus driver take us there when the tour wrapped.  This is where I spent NYE in 2010 and had a legit good time.  It's an interesting place because it draws "tourists" who are staying at the hotel as well as an older (as in, older than me) demographic who live in surrounding suburbs and come to TGC for a big night out.  There's almost always live bands performing on the weekends and there's a huge area dedicated to dancing, of which we took full advantage.

Around midnight I headed back to the room (there's a shuttle that runs from the club to the hotel) for a semi-early night, only to be woken up at 4:00am to the couple next door fighting.  A quick call to the front desk put an end to that.  The next day I was itching to get out of the burbs.  Something about it always creeps me out.  It was a fun change of scenery and the "wine tour" was entertaining, but I'll take my glass of merlot downtown any day.