In some ways it was a fiasco–but in a one-on-one, relaxedly romantic sort of way.
Our tenth-anniversary bash, a weekend away to the big-city suburbs and from everything but ourselves, started with a terrific concert by a terrific band we’d never heard of but M had researched: Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors. The band’s songs were strikingly normal, with mostly unsurprising lyrics about love, rest, worries, love, and melodies to fit, but fresh and energizing (and the lead guitar player was inspiring):
We’d brought along a borrowed GPS gadget, a lifesaver especially in the after-show rainy dark, but somehow it didn’t occur to us until we were leaving our hotel on Sunday to look at an actual map of the area around the hotel. If we would have, well, maybe we wouldn’t have had so many opportunities to throw up our hands and laugh at ourselves; our entire weekend’s adventures were actually modestly local to our hotel.
But we’re modest locals, at heart, all the way to our aspendthrift fear that the hotel amenities weren’t complimentary. The check-in man had, after all, asked for our credit card for any “additional fees.” Was the in-room coffee free? (It was.) If I turned on my beautiful Nexus 7 and accessed the internet would we be charged? (Not for the slower speed, which was okay for checking email.) Were the sleeping potions for the taking without fiscal recourse? (Now, in hindsight and with a clean credit card statement, I see that such worries were for nought.)
Since this was our tenth anniversary celebration, M had planned the weekend’s activities in part to mirror things we’d done on our honeymoon and with an ear toward flexibility; we were at our leisure. But it didn’t take us long to figure out that suburbia requires a certain–in our case lacking–common sense.
For lunch on Saturday we opted for Chinese buffet. We’d been hiking at a national park to see some roaring falls; General Tsao’s chicken and high fructose syrup-glazed broccoli couldn’t have sounded better. We pulled up outside a Starbucks to use the wifi, and found that none of the Chinese restaurants nearby were buffets.
“But you want buffet? We have buffet at other location,” one place finally said when M called.
We quickly memorized the address and headed off to…nothing. Even if we rearranged the address street numbers, no dice. After an hour-long-plus quest for Chinese, we ended up instead at a “next generation” silver diner that served locally grown food, great fries, and, for M, a cracked glass that leaked water all over the table.
M, frustrated, decided to use the bathroom–but was back in a moment. “There was a man in it,” she said, “cleaning.”
Instead we played Michael Jackson and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” from the “authentic” jukebox that we later saw was spinning CDs.
Saturday night we decided we wanted pizza. On our honeymoon we’d had it delivered to our hotel in the middle of a nighttime snowstorm, but the websites for the Domino’s and Papa John’s near us this time only said “carryout.”
“What’s with that?” we wondered, and decided that since we had to go out anyway, we would call in a takeout order from a nearby kabobs place.
As we walked out of the hotel to pick up our food, we passed a parked Domino’s pizza delivery car.
After an extra round of the confusing nighttime block thanks to my split-second decision to take the wrong road, which earlier in the day had been the right road (which I had also missed), we pulled up to a hookah lounge run by impolite and tired-looking people who gave us containers of splendid-smelling food.
A sign on the wall proudly declared, “Free delivery.”
M grabbed some napkins and we headed back to the hotel, where we realized we hadn’t gotten forks for our salad, rice, spinach goop, and chicken.
We used the little lids from the dressing containers as scoops instead.
Sunday morning we decided to set out looking for donuts and coffee.
“There’s a gas station over there,” M said.
“Yeah, but let’s go back to near the music club–there’s got to be a coffee shop or something around there.”
We checked the map and set out, our stomachs grumbling.
“Nope, nothing in that plaza there. I don’t see…Hey, there’s a Giant–let’s go there. Maybe it has a cafe.”
It didn’t, so we just bought donuts and quart of milk and headed back out to the parking lot, where we sat on the curb next to our car in the warm sun of the cool morning and then looked across the street and saw a coffee shop.
Oh well.
And then, when we’d finished, M said, “I’ll throw the trash away.”
“There’s a trash can?”
“Yep, over there–by that bench.”
“A bench? We could have been sitting on a bench?”
What bumpkins we are!
