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And then it was time for cocktails! The conference officially started on Friday night with a cocktail party in the Philadelphia Reading Terminal Market.
It was so cool being there after all the vendors had closed and it was totally empty except for us!
Blogger cocktail parties = a frenzy of photos.
Evan & I are thugs for life, no big deal. 😉
They even had a photo booth, just like last year! Ya’ll know I can’t resist those, heh.
SO fun. Here I am with my roomies for the weekend, Ashley, Gretchen, and Theodora, before heading into the booth. Props are the best, haha.
There were two groups of runners — a super long run group at 5 a.m. (those doing between 8 and 14 miles — training for marathons!), and a “shorter” run group at 6 a.m. Gotta love going to a conference where everyone is into being fit!
I was with the 6 a.m. group and there were a TON of us — about 20 girls! We all set off together and naturally split off into comfortable pace groups as we went 🙂
(With Kelly, Clare, and Kath — please note the super sexy water skiing bruise on my leg)
4.5-ish miles of running later, it was time for breakfast! Attune Foods was the Saturday morning breakfast sponsor. Loved it!
Isn’t this coaster they gave us all cute?!
And then the conference sessions officially kicked off! Meghann took the lead in planning the whole thing this year and did a fantastic (fANNEtastic?!) job!
I went to almost all of the sessions (may or may not have taken a walking break instead of listening to the keynote speaker… oops) and enjoyed them all. A favorite was a recipe writing session from my friend Stepfanie of Spark People!
I also spent some time hanging out at the Attune Foods booth passing out goodies and coupons with their Online Community Manager Annelies!
A big thank you to Attune for sponsoring my attendance at the conference this weekend — as always, I was happy to represent such an awesome company! 🙂 Whole grains and simple ingredient lists rule.
And speaking of things that rule, check out my fun new dress! It’s made by a company called Five Bamboo who was one of the sponsors of the conference this weekend (and the providers of our conference t-shirts). They surprised me with this dress as a gift yesterday and I was so excited to wear it I put it on immediately 🙂
Five Bamboo is awesome because they make their clothing out of bamboo with minimal environmental impact. Not only that — but their fabric is SUPER soft. I’m obsessed with the dress! Such a flattering cut and super comfy, too. (p.s.: If you use the coupon code HLS2011 you will get 25% off their products! Bam!) Thanks again, Five Bamboo! You guys rock 🙂
Anyway! Annelies took me and a few of the other Attune brand ambassadors/street team members in attendance out for dinner and drinks once the conference was over yesterday.
(From left — me, Annelies, Heather, Meghann, Monica)
We hit up a place called Smokin’ Betty’s!
We all shared a bunch of appetizers for dinner. BBQ sliders:
Tomato, basil, and goat cheese pizza:
A chickpea, spinach, and quinoa salad (YUM!):
And some corn muffins that I forgot to photograph 🙂 Thanks again for treating us, Annelies!
After dinner, Meghann, Monica, Heather, and I met back up with a bigger group of blogger friends to continue the festivities 🙂
Below from left: Beth, Gretchen, Chase, Katy, Theodora
(You can hardly tell in the photo above, but Claire had THE cutest black feather headband on!)
Such a fun night with friends. There were a TON of bloggers out and about last night that I didn’t get photos with!
We ended the conference this morning with a group 5k walk to and from the “Rocky steps” aka the Philadelphia Museum of Art!
I could almost hear the Rocky theme song playing 😉 We were saying they should just have a loudspeaker playing it at the steps at all times, heh.
Time to unpack, relax, and hang out with Matt! My second year of grad school starts on Tuesday — eeek! Better get organized 🙂
Have a great night!
