Anniversary celebration. How can u make it perfect?

Question

It's our third year together, and we finally got some space to do something special (a whole weekend to be exact). We've been really busy between work and college these last years and I wanna have a good time, relax and show her how much I care about her and love her.
What would you do? where would you go?


Thanks

Answer 1

What does she like? How much can you spend? How far can you travel?

Some of our most memorable anniversaries included:

* An overnight stay at a bed-and-breakfast with a really GREAT restaurant. Actually, we've done this three or four times, with different B&Bs: twice on the California coast, once at the Oregon coast and once along the Columbia River. Find a place with great scenery, lovely furnishings, a terrific restaurant, and beds that don't creak or collapse. (That was the WORST anniversary...)

* A dinner cruise on the river at sunset. For our 25th, we booked dinner on a cruise boat on the Willamette River (in Portland, OR). The cruise takes about three hours, and brings you back to downtown Portland right as the sun is setting (at least for late-June anniversaries). We took the whole day off, sent the kids to friends, went downtown to our favorite Greek restaurant for lunch (when we were first married, in Chicago, our favorite hangout was a Greek place on N. Halsted), then spent three hours in Powell's City of Books, with no kids to ask us when we were leaving. Yeah, we're nerds. :-) The dinner cruise was the icing on the cake, with live music on the ship and fantastic food and wine.

* An all-day trip to Disneyland. I should have sprung for the works and taken out a motel room for the night, but we only lived about an hour away at the time. We, um, did get very naughty in a dressing room in Frontierland...

* A "dinner with the winemaker." This year we were invited by the wine club we belong to, to a special winemaker's dinner that happened to fall a few days before our anniversary, at our favorite winery and catered by the chef of a top local restaurant. It was lovely, with great food and fabulous winem all served in their tasting room, a 1905 farmhouse said to be haunted. And at the end of the evening, they shook our hands and thanked us for joining them... and didn't give us a bill.

* A national sports-car club convention at a lovely motel right on the coast in Santa Barbara, California. We had a second-floor suite overlooking the ocean; if we'd fallen off the balcony we would have landed in the sand, and this was one of the few stretches of the southern California coast where the sun sets into the ocean, and not into the hills. Sunsets were awesome.

* A classic car show up in the Sierra foothills, with a rally on Saturday and the show itself on Sunday (and a stay at the Chico Holiday Inn in the middle). A friend had been asking me for several years to come up to his show in the small town of Paradise, California, just outside Chico, and one year the show actually fell on our anniversary. So I sidled up to my wife, put my arm around her waist, and said, "Hey, honey, how'd you like me to take you to Paradise for our anniversary?" She looked at me under one raised eyebrow and said, "This is some kinda car thing, isn't it?" It was... but we had a great time. Late June, the girls were 5 and 8, they loved the swimming pool and we loved the door between our adjoining rooms.

* A charming little hotel, all made up of detached cabins/suites, in an equally charming Danish community in the central California coast. We put the kids in the sitting room (three kids, three fold-out beds) and took the master bedroom for ourselves. Our bedroom opened onto a private outdoor hot tub, with a 10-foot fence around it, and in the morning we could climb out of bed and into the hot tub without all this nonsense about bathing suits. During the day we walked around town, toured the countryside, hiked up to a waterfall, looked in all the neat shops, and had a great time with the whole family.

Things NOT to do:

* Stay in a room with a king-size bed on a frame made of crummy MDF that will creak and, eventually, collapse under you.

* Stay in a room with a jet tub in the bedroom, because if you sit over the jets just right they will spray your bed and you will be damp and clammy all night. (Same B&B, come to think of it...)

* Have such a big dinner that when you get home, you both lie in bed moaning about how your stomach hurts from eating too much.

* Believe your spouse when you hear "Oh, it doesn't have to be anything special, let's just be casual this year."

* Forget the champagne. Well, maybe it's something different for you, but for us, it's not an anniversary without champagne. Lots of it, spread out over the entire day and/or weekend.

In retrospect, I'd have to say that my favorite anniversaries have been the ones where we stayed overnight, choosing somewhere special in its own right, and in an area that had a good balance between romantic activity and other things to do -- sightseeing, shopping, visiting wineries, and the like. As you can probably tell, I have an interest in cars, which means like going to places that have scenic, twisty roads so I can put the top down and enjoy getting there; we both like to eat well and to enjoy wine, which is why we like to stay at a place with a good restaurant attached, if possible -- I love wine and I love my cars, but I don't love them both at the same time.

So this is kind of a ramble... and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!