Austin's First Annual Bleetup!!

After a fabulous and much needed whirlwind weekend trip to Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, and Newport Beach, I am finally posting a long overdue post on the FABULOUS first annual Austin's Bleetup hosted by the lovely Tolly. The Four Seasons Trio so graciously sponsored the event and provided the perfect, gorgeous outdoor venue on the lake.

Along with absolutely delicious appetizers including rosemary potato wedges, mini lambburgers and the set up to roast your own s'mores

complete with graham crackers, chocolate, and strawberries, and half off drinks. They also generously provided complimentary gift bags for the first 50 guests stuffed with all sorts of CDs, lotions, yummy TRIO popcorn goodies and lots of gift certificates!

So happy I happened to be number 47! The set up small tables to hold the champagne, with lovely gerbera daisy centerpieces and bubbles for those who wanted to indulge their inner child and play or take party favors home to their children like I did , as well as an entire area set up with cushy lounge chairs and sofas.

creating the PERFECT atmosphere.

The lovely, fun, and totally at ease Cory Ryan came out and did an AMAZING and fun photo booth that I crashed three times and was amazed by how at ease she put her subjects. I was also amazed at how much FUN we had in three minutes and came away with as many or moer gorgeous photos with her signature bright, and vivid colors.

I had read about the whole event just two weeks ago when I first discovered Tolly's fun Austin blog, Austin Eavesdropper, and jumped on reserving my RSVP right away and spread the word to other Austin bloggers I know. Dani and Mai, below,

also jumped on RSVPing. We were so excited to all go together! Mai and I crashed the lakeside hammocks as soon as we got there, trying to get the lake in the background.

I hadn't gotten a chance to read many other blogs, so we were on our own as far as introducing ourselves and meeting random x blogger. It was definitely intimidating but once we found a few stray wallflowers, we snagged them and proceeded to extract their blog story from them.

Brando met up with us as well and we ended up having a nice conversation with another "husband of blogger", R, Tolly's hubby,

Unfortunately, I was a total dork and left Brando's memory sticks for his camera at home when I went to meet up with him, so you will have to check out the lovely photos he took when Mai and I got him to steal her camera and cover the event over at Mai's. Correct me if I'm wrong, Mai, but the first two are by Mai, and the rest are by him. The evening started at 6pm and ended pretty promptly at 8pm,

except for us stragglers who stayed behind to get as much chatting in as we possibly could.

The overall evening was absolutely superb. I had so much fun meeting new friends and bloggers, including Seth from Year of the Pizza, the lovely and oh so knowledgable of all drinks free Amber Demure, who actually suggested the Four Seasons as the venue in the first place, and the very sweet Stephanie Marie of the Colours Marie.