A Birthday Expedition

My husband Ben turns 30 this month!  I gave him his choice of having any type of party he wanted, after some brainstorming we landed on an Adventure Themed party (think Indiana Jones, African Queen, Tarzan, etc.)  The location was my mother in law's back yard, we dubbed it Brother's Landing.  We wanted the backyard to feel like Adventureland at Disneyland.  Over the last couple months we been acquiring eclectic looking items by purchasing them at thrift stores and borrowing them from friends/family.  Of course our own stash also yielded much adventureish loot.  We also put together two play lists; one for jungle type sounds and the other for music.  It all came together yesterday and was a total success!  Come journey through the party planning process with me!

Our guest arrived at Brother's Landing (the name of our adventure's club - in honor of the fact that Ben has 5 younger brothers and this is their family home).

 We had our guests walk down the long drive along the side of the house to enter the backyard where the party was.

 We had more food than we knew what to do with!  But what's a party without some food? ;)

The original plan was to make this the tiki bar, but the roof ended up too low, so instead it became a great photo booth!

Here is the backyard before it got dark, as some of our first guests arrived.

And then again after it got dark and the lights did their magic!

We took the old playhouse and turned it into a jungle shack!  Inside we hooked up some speakers to play a list of jungle sound effects.

Here is the birthday boy and myself all ready to party!

Here I am with some of my awesome friends.  Notice the cool looking shield on the fence?  Ben made 4 of these to decorate the yard with.

In the year yard we offered croquet and a shooting range for our guest to amuse themselves with.  Below is a picture of the shooting range - it had playing cards clothes-pinned to a line for guest to shoot air soft guns at.

My cousin and his wife were awesome at this!

This was the most perfect backyard, it came complete with a tree house.  We provided the barrel...

Our guests came in some great adventure gear!

I attempted to make a fedora cake, somehow it ended up looking like a stetson.  Once all 30 candles were lit you couldn't tell though! ;)

Maybe it wasn't the best idea to let Ben cut the cake!

I was so bummed when I realized it was already late and our friends would be leaving, the party was so much fun I wanted it to keep going!  Ben was a very happy guy, and had a rollicking good time!