Our Trip to Richmond, Travel Essentials & News About Something New!

Happy Sunday everyone! I hope you are having a relaxing day. Today we have a post recapping our recent trip to Richmond together and we also have a fun announcement about something new we’re going to be doing.

At one point over the summer Christy and I typically get together either at a conference or a blog related event but this summer we decided to make the best use of our time and meet up for a 24 hour power planning session in one of my favorite cities–Richmond, Virginia. We stayed at the luxurious Jefferson Hotel; we treated ourselves since we only had one night and I will say it was a fabulous place to stay.

It was raining hard the day we arrived but we made the best of the gorgeous lobby and restaurant and got to work planning out some new things we wanted to do here at 11 Magnolia Lane. The happy hour bellinis were an added bonus! As we get ready to start our 10th year of blogging here this fall, it was a great time to look at where we want to go from here. I think we’re both struggling a bit to ‘keep up’ with the ever growing pressure of perfect homes, perfect clothes and perfectly styled pictures. We don’t feel comfortable always representing that expectation.  This blog started to share inspiration, we spent quite some time talking about how to still do that without overly promoting perfection and consumption.

So we have some fun changes in mind this coming year. I don’t want to promise all of them right now then have something fall through the cracks but we are as of today launching a new format for our Sunday newsletter and you can sign up below!

We are doing this for several reasons. Sunday is a great day to look forward to the week ahead (read our Sunday Routine Post here) so we want to add value to that aspect of our day. We also want to start sharing beyond just our posts, as in things that wouldn’t necessarily command a whole post but that you might find interesting. Therefore we’ll still be including all the weekly post links as we already do in our Sunday newsletter so you can read anything you might have missed, but now we’ll be sharing additional things to help you get through the week ahead. We’ll try to include what we’re eating (like a great recipe), favorite things we’ve found to share, what we’re up to the coming week, organizational tips and other quick tidbits you all might be interested in.  It won’t be long–we promise–just a few fun items to make it worth your while to open and help you have a great week ahead.

You may be wondering if you already get our emails do you need to subscribe to this too, the answer is yes. This content will only be available via the Sunday newsletter and not in our daily feed emails. If you already get our weekly newsletter (sent on Sunday afternoons) then you don’t need to, but feel free to fill out the form if you aren’t sure.

Before I go, we covered all sorts of topics while together but we always pick up great must-have travel ideas from each other. Here’s a quick round up, we couldn’t resist a quick selfie in Christy’s convertible before heading out! Christy’s Le Pilage bag is her go to for travel, see it peeking out in the back?

The older I get the harder it is to sleep in new places, a sleep mask is key! We laughed when we both pulled ours out before hitting the hay. This one is less than $10 and of course, pink!

In the interest of staying hydrated we both carry around Yeti tumblers whereever we go. I have the aqua color, she has white.

A sleep app on your phone helps so much, which we learned the hard way. I use the “Rain Rain” app for white noise but forgot to turn it on. We realized just how close our room was to the elevator (which dinged on every floor) very early the next morning.

Finally, I keep saying I need to get away from packing in a duffel style bag (where by the end of the weekend everything is a jumbled mess!) and instead invest in a small roller bag, this pink one from the current Anniversary sale is perfect.

Again, don’t forget to sign up for our new magazine style newsletter below (it is just one email a week, and we will never sell your info we cross our hearts!)

XO,

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