The Anniversary Caper

Last week, Lady Di and I celebrated fourteen years of wedded bliss. So I went to Hallmark to read the master list of acceptable gifts for number one-four. I searched and searched but could not find any tools on any of the lists. All I could hope for was that this year was the year of the 'it's the thought that counts' gift. No luck. The traditional gift was ivory and the modern gift is gold jewelry. I thought, "Ah come on! Gold for the fourteenth? What ever happened to the golden anniversary being the fiftieth?" I seriously believe that jewelers, most of them women, made sure that some sort of gold was assigned to every four and a half anniversaries to boost sales and their own jewelry boxes. And how was I going to bag an elephant for the traditional ivory gift?

With my options limited to those, I decided to play dumb and go in a different direction.

I started with picking a weekend that I could get someone to watch our kids. Luckily, LD's sister stepped up and magnanimously volunteered to entertain her niece and nephew with a sleep over.

My plan was to trick LD into thinking that we were going to her sister's house for a game night and stay over. Once we arrived at her house, we said good bye to the kids and I hustled LD out to the van before she knew what was going on.

We then drove about twenty miles to a bed and breakfast. I think LD was surprised. We stayed upstairs in the Edna room. After unpacking, we had dinner at the Gasthaus German restaurant. This was the first time either of us had been to one. The food was good and the beer was better.We even had our very own personal accordion player, Hilda. Actually, her name wasn't Hilda and she played for everyone at the restaurant. But we did get to visit with her quite a bit and she even played a song for our anniversary. After dinner we had to decide what to do next. Should we go downtown for a drink or dance the night away at a club? We chose to go back to our bed and breakfast and play Monopoly in our room. I know, the city sure didn't have to call in any extra law enforcement for our wild night out, but sometimes spending a quiet, comfortable evening alone with your spouse is as much fun as anything.Here is a picture of our room. Our bed was very comfortable and we slept very soundly even with that picture of Edna Mulvey on the wall watching us.

Before bed I told LD to set the alarm for the 9am breakfast. She said she was going to sleep in. I told her, we paid for breakfast, we're eating breakfast!

The next morning we ate stuffed french toast with four other couples in the main dining room. I'm always nervous about eating with a group of people I don't know. I'm not very much of a talker. But I didn't need to be because two other people at the table did enough talking for all twelve of us.

Mercifully, the talkers got tired of all of our listening and we were able to get back to our room to pack up and check out.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking up and down the town's main street visiting many boutiques, antique stores and sweet shoppes. Why do retailers think they can charge more just because they have French spelled words over their doors? After much window shopping, I was ready to head for home.

But first, we had to pick up the kids.

They had spent the afternoon at the pumpkin patch. It was great for Auntie Sue and Uncle Tom to take them because we hadn't time all Fall to schedule it in ourselves. They enjoyed carmel apples, face paint and got to run through the corn maze. No one got lost in the corn and they found all of the dinosaur signs.

When we came to pick them up they were pretty exhausted. But not too exhausted for Lego Indiana Jones video game at Auntie's.

They were very disappointed that they couldn't stay with their aunt and uncle longer. We were already missing them and they were complaining that we were there to pick them up. I think we all were a little tired.