Girly weekends - why I chose real friends over virtual ones

This weekend, it seems that most mummy bloggers headed off to the Cybermummy conference for the biggest girly weekend ever. From the bazillions of tweets and posts on it so far, it seems to have been a marvellous experience and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't just a little (ok a lot) bit jealous.

But I couldn't go. You see the week before the date for Cybermummy was announced, I'd confirmed a girly weekend with a group of my real life friends. Getting a date that suited all of us rivalled military logistical planning, so once I realised that it was going to clash with Cybermummy I was torn.

Do I go to the biggest blogging event in the UK and meet all the wonderful bloggers I've met online? Or do I go to Lymington for a weekend of drinking cocktails and talking rubbish with my 'real life' or 'offline' friends.

Wearing my PR hat, I should have been at Cybermummy. Wearing my mummy blogger hat, it would have been lovely to put some faces to names at the conference. But wearing my Melissa hat, meeting up with friends who know me in all my different hats won the day.

And it was worth it.

I haven't laughed as much (or drunk as much wine) in years. We talked, we walked along the seafront, we laughed, we shopped, we drank wine, we played poker, we drank cocktails, we laughed some more, we had thoroughly inappropriate conversations, we ate fab food, we giggled like fools, we flirted with waiters, we ate ice creams in the sun, we talked some more, we tried on clothes, we watched tennis, we laughed, we picked out houses we'd buy if we won the lottery, we had hangovers, we recounted stories from the night before that were blurry, we got told we were too old to get into a nightclub (damn their eyes), we laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

It was fantastic. So to the 4 lovely ladies who were with me in Lymington, thank you for an amazing time. To all the lovely ladies I didn't get to meet at Cybermummy, I'm sure you understand that sometimes you need to live it, rather than just write it. But next year, I'll be there with bells on.