Each year, Grace’s firm holds a conference boondoggle for all summer interns. The responsibility for planning rotates among the regions, and this year, Grace and her team were in charge. Coincidentally (or by design), the conference was held at the St. Regis Monarch Beach, where we were married 6+ years ago. The event had hints of our wedding weekend, except this was for 650 people. This was our first time staying at the resort together since then.
Grace headed down on Wednesday morning, right after returning from our cruise. I didn’t join her until Friday afternoon. The Friday event was held at the Mission San Juan Capistrano, which was a beautiful 230-year-old venue. The after party was held back at the resort at Club 19. We rallied early on Saturday for a golf scramble, which we played with a couple of Grace’s colleagues. The winning score was -11, which is pretty impressive. We decided to play best ball and likely finished over par.
Saturday evening’s event started with cocktails outside. The evening had some sort of international theme and the entertainment was kicked off by some electric-cello-playing Viking who had a fan positioned specifically to blow his hair back as he played. It was awesome. Dinner moved indoors to the Grand Ballroom, where a variety of foods was served. I chose beef and beef.
On Sunday, Grace got up early to coordinate departures and help wind things down. I played golf again with Dan, one of our playing partners from Saturday. Bo, a summer, also joined us. He’s coincidentally at Kellogg and more interestingly from Iceland (only the 4th Icelander in Kellogg history). All I can say is that swearing in Icelandic sounds amazing (do you think Rosetta Stone would cover this?).
Grace and the entire team did an unbelievable job planning this event. I think they were pretty spent when it was all over, but hopefully it was gratifying to them that everyone had a great time.
