Continuing on with yesterday's post about Afternoon Tea at the Royal Park Hotel... When we finished our tea meal my girlfriend, Lori, and I distributed our gift bags to the ladies. The post I wrote about the items in the gift bags can be read here.
The ladies presented me with gifts to express their appreciation for putting the tour together, even though it never happened. They were SO good to me, I knew this trip needed to be rescheduled in the spring for them.
Below are the thoughtful and generous gifts they gave me. Louise follows my blog, and she remembered my May 30th post about my collection of violet teacups - the flower for February, my birth month, so she gave me a beautiful Shelley teacup that's called Violets.
She too graduated from Roosevelt High School in Wyandotte, MI, and in her gift bag was also a lovely gold ornament of the high school. [The pictures below can be enlarged for better viewing by clicking on them.] What a lovely keepsake!
Another gift bag contained two blue Deco Jasperware mini-vases. They fit in perfectly with my collection of Wedgwood Jasperware. I love that the color is a deeper blue than the Wedgwood.
Another gift bag contained a bone china cup and saucer commemorating Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee in 2002, An'TEA'quers club cookbook, and inside that little box with the bow was a "It's a Snap" necklace.
Are you familiar with the jewelry that has snap on jewels? I tried to show how they work in the photo below. Six snap on jewels accompanied the necklace.
Another gift bag had a crystal sunflower sun catcher to hang in a window. My favorite flower is sunflowers. Before I decorated my kitchen in a tea theme it was done in sunflowers because they're so cheerful. Also included was tea-themed note tablet and pen, and a P.F. Chang's gift card.
And last but not least, was another P.F. Chang's gift card [one of Jerry's and my favorite restaurants] and a gift bag that Teresa prepared for all the participants.
What can I say about Teresa besides amazing?! Last year on the Michigan Tea Tour she did a fabulous tea and chocolate tasting/pairing for us, which you can read about here. She volunteered to do it again on an abbreviated scale during this tea tour [she couldn't bring everything in the van that she transported in her car last year]. Below is the individual tea tasting box she assembled for each participant. It contained three chocolates with three teas to taste with each chocolate - for a total of nine teas.
Also inside the bag was an Ohio tea towel, an Ohio buckeye candy, and mints.
Teresa creatively put together a booklet for each participant that included a day-by-day break down of the itinerary: a brief history [with pictures] of each place we were visiting, menus of tearooms we were visiting with a sheet to review it, a daily summary sheet: My favorite thing today; The worst thing today [as trip coordinator I hope that would have been blank every day ;-)]; A magical thing that happened; The funniest thing today; and a space for general comments, a devotional from Emilie Barnes The Tea Lover's Devotional for each day of the tour, and a couple of games to play while traveling in the van. What a wonderful keepsake! Thanks for your labor of love, Teresa!
Watch for more posts about the same tour being rescheduled for April or May 2018.
What lovely gifts! Yes, please do reschedule for spring! (But I must tell you that I heard from my cousin that The English Rose in Chattanooga has closed, lost their lease. I hope they will find another location and reopen.)
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