It probably comes as no surprise that I am the planner in my household. It’s in my nature. It’s just what I do. Possibly to a fault.

Therefore, it was a leap for me to turn over the responsibility of planning our one-year anniversary get-away to my husband.

It wasn’t that I questioned his capability. It was that months of not knowing where we were traveling, what we were going to be doing or what I needed to pack (ALL my favorite list/organization duties!) was driving me wild.

He volunteered to plan our anniversary trip pretty shortly after we returned from our honeymoon. At the time I was already working on planning our big trip to Morocco, Portugal and Spain so it’s possible I didn’t give full consideration to what plans he might put in place.

He’s great at many things, but he’s particularly adept at keeping secrets. He wouldn’t give anything away about where we were headed, and he only gave me an indication of weather so that I could appropriately pack one day ahead of our departure. The only things I knew were that we were driving and that it would be a long weekend.

We headed out early on Friday, and I kept texting my mom landmarks along the way because she and her work friends were also trying to guess where we would end up. I have to admit it was a little exciting!

We headed east, and as we drove into New York, I started to really wonder where we were headed. We passed the exits for Niagara Falls so I had started to think of places in upstate New York when he pulled over into a lot near the Canadian border. He had me pull down my passenger side visor and there was our wedding ceremony program! Only it wasn’t our program–he had reworked our program design into an itinerary for our anniversary weekend. We were headed to Niagara-on-the-Lake for a weekend in wine country, and he had planned the entire stay!

I might have cried. I was touched that he put so much effort into the surprise and that he had taken time to not just book our stay, but arrange for a wine tour, walking tour, dinner plans and more throughout the weekend.

We hadn’t been to region since we got engaged in 2012 and that was in the middle of winter so I was really excited we would get to see everything during harvest with the beautiful fall weather. I was also thrilled we were going to stay in the incredible ‘rooms above the pub’ at the Irish Pub just off the main street again. He had planned an absolutely PERFECT weekend!

We had a wonderful weekend full of relaxation (his favorite), wine (my favorite) and awesome live music in the pub each night before bed (our favorite). I could easily make this an annual trip!

Here are a few highlights: