This past weekend out of town capped off several weeks of fun activities. The title of this post sums up the weekend in so many ways: Picture Perfect!

On Friday morning I headed over to Michigan City, IN for a scrapbooking getaway weekend with friends. We had seen the website for the Picture Perfect cottage a couple of years ago & hoped that sometime we would be able to pull together a group for a weekend of scrapbooking fun. Late this summer we started planning & were originally booked for a weekend next May. Through some scheduling mix-ups we were lucky enough to end up with a fall weekend.

If you’ve ever scrapbooked, you know that you have a lot of supplies involved with it. My car was loaded up with supplies for 3 gals & then Jen & I headed over across the Chicago Skyway (Kristy would be coming later in the afternoon). Just after noon we all descended on the charming cottage & immediately said ‘Wow’ – it had a great layout for everyone to be working. Once everyone unloaded our bags & bags of supplies we “set up shop” and got to work.

My project for the weekend was completing the Mexico Mission Trip 1988 album that I had started planning 2 weeks ago. It quickly came together. It was fun to read through my “journal” entries from the trip & then expand on them as I built out the pages.

While the focus of the weekend was scrapbooking, everyone was free to do what they wanted. A couple of women brought their bikes and also did some Nordic walking. Others strolled through the charming development & over to the beach. Naps were taken as needed. I have a secret knitting deadline so I was able to make great progress on that. I had thought I might go to a few of my favorite Harbor Country shops but found the pull of this charming house was too great.

As we shuffled through our assorted iPods on the great sound system in the house (talk about an assortment of musical styles…) the conversations among us flowed from one topic to another. While pictures were cropped and pages completed, stories and anecdotes were shared. As we looked through our own albums and the albums of the others we were reminded of truly how blessed we each were – with family, friends, experiences and fond memories.

During the days, the autumn sunshine through the trees streamed in through an abundance of windows. In the evenings the overhead lights were well placed and ensured we didn’t have to work in poor lighting. In addition to the great space for working on our scrapbooks the rest of the house was well thought out to meet our needs. The five bedrooms & 3 baths comfortably accommodated the 10 of us. A full kitchen had everything we could need & the catering package supplied us with more than enough food for all of our meals (at the end we brought a lot of leftovers back to Chicago).

We joked that the time change meant that we would have an extra hour to work on our albums. Turns out it wasn’t a joke for some of us – 5 of us were up and sitting at our tables before 6AM on Sunday, sometimes you just wake up & can’t get back to sleep.

Much too quickly it was time for us to pack up our cars, take out the trash and set the alarm code before leaving this charming getaway and returning to real life. We all agreed that it was indeed a Picture Perfect weekend and are already looking at when we can come back.

(more pictures here)