Turn of the Season | Goodbye, Summer • Fave Summer Memories

I cannot tell you guys how thrilled I am to collaborate with my friend Kristin of Super Space Chick to bring you Turn of the Season, an event that celebrates our love of our two favorite seasons - summer and autumn. We'll be looking back at the summer that's passed, as well as looking ahead at the autumn to come, and we hope you enjoy coming along for the ride!

It's been such a wonderful summer, friends. I've been so lucky! I have had the best time hanging out with family and friends, and making memories that I'll cherish forever. As part of this weeklong event, we wanted to take the opportunity to look back on some of our favorite summer memories. I'm sharing nine of mine today! Again, we're tackling anything we happened to do in the months of June, July and August.

Book Expo America & BookCon | I had the incredible privilege of being able to attend both BEA and BookCon this year! It's always such a fun experience to interact with the lovely folks who work so hard to bring us such amazing books, the authors who write said books and the folks who love books of all genres with a passion. I had a great time visiting publisher booths, attending a few special events and, best of all, I got to spend lots of time hanging out with Kristin! (If you wanted to see what I got up to, here are my BEA day one vlog, my BEA days two and three vlog, my BookCon vlog, my haul and Macky's haul.)

Night Nation Run | I'm not an athletic person at all, but my sister and two of my friends convinced me to join them for this fun run that happens at night. It's a very casual run (obviously) and you go from stage to stage, where you can basically stop and listen to whichever DJ is rocking that stop. While it wasn't necessarily exactly what I imagined it would be like, it was still a cool experience!

Rhode Island Road Trip | Rachel and I always try to do a summer weekend road trip every year, and this year, we decided we would go to Rhode Island. Our weekend getaway was just a really lovely and relaxed adventure, with a bit of sightseeing, a bit of beach time, visits to bookstores (of course), an ice cream outing (of course) and a lot of delicious food too. (You can read all about it in my post!)

Coldplay concert | My sister Mel surprised me with tickets to go and see Coldplay (as a birthday present), and it was so fun! It was so great to hear all of my favorites performed live (especially A Sky Full of Stars and Fix You, which were so, so, so incredible), and I also just thought that the way they staged everything was really fun too.

Birthday picnic | I decided I wanted a low key birthday this year, so I invited all of my friends to hang out at one of my favorite parks - Gantry Plaza State Park. It's a lovely place, and not too crowded on most days and you get a stellar view of the Manhattan skyline. I loved spending quality time with all of my favorite people, and it was just the best way to ring in 28.

Dirty Dancing at Bryant Park | Rachel clued me in on the fact that they were going to be showing Dirty Dancing for one of the movie nights at Bryant Park, and we obviously needed to be there. It was really crowded (unsurprising considering the location and the size of it), but it was so much fun to be seeing a classic film with so many folks. I was especially thrilled when everyone got up and started to dance during the final scene!

Seeing the ballet | Rachel and I went to see more ballets performed by the American Ballet Theater this year. As always, it was the loveliest experience! I am always in awe of the professional ballerinas I adore (Misty Copeland and Stella Abrera, in case you were wondering), and seeing these beautiful ballets is always inspiring (to my writer's heart). (It also often leaves me wishing I'd kept dancing instead of giving it up all those years ago.) (Click here to find out which ballets I saw and what I thought!)

Trips to the beach | This was the first year where I actually managed to visit the beach multiple times in a summer! Mel and I actually figured out that there was an easy commute to the Rockaways from where we live (though it does take a while), and we visited fairly regularly through the middle of the season. I love the beach. I live for the sun shining down on me, and drowsing on beach blankets. I love the smell of the ocean and the sound of the waves. Beach trips = the best.

Ice cream dates | It wouldn't be summer without ice cream dates! I had a lot of ice cream this year (and visited a ton of new places, thanks to Rachel) (Check out Rachel's Project Ice Cream recap while you're at it!), and I loved every second of it. Dessert fiend? Ice cream lover? That would be me. And I will happily continuing having ice cream up until it's too cold out for me to comfortably enjoy it.

I hope you enjoyed taking a trip down (summer) memory lane with me! It was fun to see all the cool things I got to do, and to reminisce about them a little bit. What are your favorite memories from this summer?