Forever 35

Today wasn’t such an early start in comparison, but it still takes an effort to be up and trek to the foyer by 8.30am to board a bus to take us to various shopping mecca’s.

The problem with today is that I took zero photos so the following is purely on memory and I hope at my age, it still serves.

So we squeezed ( and I mean squeezed) onto our mini van, attempted to buckle up and as you would imagine, a bus full of women with heavy wallets heading on a shopping day, the atmosphere was one of varying degrees of elation and expectation of finding treasures untold and those treasures coming to us cheap as chips.

The first stop was at a place that looked like a warehouse city, and each ‘shop’ nearly required a gopher to get around in the allotted time.

Here the big drawcards were the Disney outlet shop and Michaels ( think mega scrapbooking/craft store).

And on arrival, despite it being marginally past opening time, the Disney outlet was still closed, so I dragged myself away and walked down to Michaels with my heart beating wildly as any scrapper’s would, promising myself to leave a little while at the end of our 1 hour stop to dash back to the Disney outlet…

OMG… I was barely in the doors and I was piling things in my arms with wild abandon. Not only the vast array of choices but the stunningly low price points of things I KNEW the cost of back home, had me almost hyperventilating and I gathered with gusto without a thought of how much the Martha Stewart punches were going to weigh down my luggage or how many sparkly things I actually need.

This was the first of only a few dent-worthy shopping efforts and I definitely bolstered Michaels bottom line today.   Given that I was travelling in the land of Halloween frenzy, most of my photos and therefore the resultant scrap pages will feature this holiday heavily, and as a result, much of what I purchased had that in mind.  ( see… I didn’t just grab any ol’ thing… I had a plan… of sorts)

I charged down every isle gathering loot as I went, candle melts that smelled edible, multiple cup cake sprinkles that I could not live without, candy corn, Halloween decorations, candy corn, multiple (cast iron centred) Martha punches, candy corn and of course, sparkly/glittery/goulish embellies that I will lovingly sprinkle on the countless pages that will be my trip album that helps me relive my adventure when I get home.

By now, the time limit was looming and I still had so many aisles I hadn’t traversed so on questioning  some of the other girls if I came across them as to the ‘worth’ of time in the Disney outlet, I made the decision to give it a miss all together and stayed in the welcoming arms of craft heaven till about 2 minutes to departure.

So it was back onto the bus we squeezed, and talk turned to the gargantuan outlet mall we were about to encounter.  Much of the chat centering around a store called Forever 21- the chicky babes store of choice for their clubbing gear.  Now I hadn’t heard much about it before, other than a meme I’d read once where ‘old ducks’ shopped there and renamed it Forever 35.  I giggled at the thought and was sure it was going to be a store I just bolted through to get to the ‘good stuff’…

OMG…how wrong was I? 

As it turned out, our meeting point was going to be in  the carpark outside Forever 21, and on disembarking our little bus, we were immediately aware of the stunning BARGAINS that this store was going to offer with the racks that lured us inside within minutes promising sale prices at $8.99 or less. 

And discovering that it didn’t just cater to size 0 was where I fell in love with this place and became a ‘Forever 35’.   The second I walked in the door, a very helpful attendant handed me a MASSIVE fold up basket, that I had a secret giggle to myself about not filling .

 Joke was on me… I filled that baby to the top.

  I spent almost a third of our available time in this mega store that I actually had to ask which room the check out was in.  I bought jewellery, hair accessories, summer sun hats, gorgeous vintage inspired clothing for my 18 year old, and lots and lots of clothes for myself.  And the kicker was, that when I finally DID locate the check out, they informed me that everything I had in my bulging basket was 50% off the marked price… most of it between $2.99 and $8 ….

Heaven!!!  I’d spent the princely sum of $55 and the huge plastic bag I carried out was bursting at the seams.

So with a little guilt ringing in my ears, I headed off to the Nike outlet store to assuage some of the guilt by buying 2 pairs of shoes for my 21year old. 

I was really starting to sit well into the whole ‘shop till you drop’ and multiple pairs of shoes, chocolate covered cherries, a wetzels pretzel and countless other tidbits later, it was time to drag my shopping bag laden self back to the meet up point and then try and figure out how all the other girls with the same amount of shopping were going to fit back onto that little bus.

Loot packed literally all around us and up to our chins, we swapped shopping conquest stories all the way back to the resort and it is embarrassing yet satisfying to say, that today’s purchases alone covered my queen-sized bed meaning I’d crossed the point where another bag for the trip home was now no longer a possibility but a given.

I could have (and probably will do next time) spent a full day here, and still not seen all the streets of stores full of end of season bargains. 

Some of our number had booked a sunset dinner cruise so they headed off on that adventure and the rest of us chilled for the evening.  I have zero idea where we ate dinner – or if in fact, we even had any, I seem to remember eating a sinfully sugary cinnabon roll one night for dinner and I suspect this was the night.