In Case You Wondered What We Did for Our Anniversary

Considering we’ve spent the last decade doing an overnight trip to celebrate our anniversary, you didn’t think that my husband and I were going to let the 20th slip by without doing something, right? It was a little more challenging this year, though. Normally, we would go away to a bed-and-breakfast the Saturday before our anniversary, with my sister watching the kids, but this year, between the two kids, we had five hockey games in three days. 😮 We could not ask my sister to navigate it all, so we decided instead to celebrate our anniversary on the actual day, Tuesday, January 31. Considering that one of the kids practices was canceled, so that left only one practice to deal with, it seemed like it wouldn’t be too difficult. Luckily, we have a lot of friends in our kids schools, and we found a couple of kind families who are willing to take our kids overnight. 

And then, Jamie’s coach sent an email late Monday morning, saying that emergency switch had been done in our hockey schedule, Jamie had a game Tuesday night. :/ And then, after scrambling to make completely different arrangements for him, we woke up to 5 inches of snow on Tuesday and a snow day. Oh for crying out loud! 😛 We are nothing if not determined, and we somehow made it all work.

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you know that my husband is in complete charge of our anniversary trip. He plans the location of where we will stay, as well as the fancy dinner that we will eat. He’s a true romantic at heart. 🙂 Every year, we play the same game in the weeks leading up to our anniversary: I ask him where we’re staying or where we’re going to dinner, and he gives me BS answers. This year’s answer was pretty creative: he informed me that we were going camping. :-P. I am notorious for my dislike of camping, which was solidified in the first few years of our relationship, when I suffered through several camping trips in a row.  Sorry, but my kind of camping involves big comfy bed and concierge service. ;). Or, in the case of our anniversary overnight, Victorian frills and gilt. What can I say, I have a degree in history; I absolutely love my Victorian architecture! 

When he told me we were going camping, I laughed and told him that there are no campgrounds open this time of year. He quickly replied, “Well, maybe those fancy, hihg-end campgrounds might be closed, but state land is open year round.” My husband is nothing if not a smart ass. 😉

As it turns out, he ended up having the last laugh, though. When we arrived at our destination, everything seemed exactly as I expected. 

Looks pretty Victorian, right? But then, we walked up the stairs to the room at the back of the inn…

Say what?! 

It turns out my husband found the only bed and breakfast in the Midwest that had a wilderness lodge-themed room! 

Lots of wood and antlers everywhere. 😛 The walls look like the inside of a log cabin, but don’t be fooled: it’s actually wallpaper!  The owners really went all out in decorating this room, not sparing any attention to detail.  Even the tissue box cover was made to look like a woodpile:

There was a wooden bench at the end of the bed, complete with a “grizzly bear”: 

I named him Boris.  I wanted to take him home. We also had a fireplace with a deer head made out of wicker:

I named him Gunther, but I did not want to take him home. The fireplace was awesome, by the way. It was one of those gas ones that has a remote, and it was just so perfect for a cold January night. I didn’t want to leave it! 

The room, although certainly not decorated as I expected, turned out to be great. It was big, had wonderful vaulted ceilings, the bed was very comfortable, and of course, the fireplace was just fabulous. 

For dinner, my husband decided to play it by ear, since it was a Tuesday night, and we weren’t likely to run into big wait at any of the restaurants in the area. He told me he had a couple places in mind, and then he drove to the one that he felt would be the best option. It turned out to be a place that I was familiar with, a restaurant called Gauchos. I’m not sure if it’s a chain, but the concept is fairly common: basically, it’s a meat lovers paradise, where they walk around the dining room with huge skewers of meat, and they just keep coming back and offering you more. 

Now, I’m no stranger to meat. I am especially fond of steak. However, when we arrived, my heart sank. I just didn’t want to be bombarded with food, especially in an all-you-can-eat fashion. My willpower just isn’t that good, honestly. My husband could tell that I wasn’t too enthused about that restaurant, so he decided to try another one. We drove down the road only a couple minutes to a restaurant called Flemings.  I was familiar with it, because I used to work just around the corner from it. I have since learned that it’s actually a chain. If you’ve never heard of it, it is probably one of the most expensive steak houses you’ll encounter. It’s hard not to call it overpriced, but on the other hand…our meal was amazing!

I had a salad, the 8 ounce filet (omigod I love filet mignon so much), a little bit of the Parmesan-encrusted bread, and Jason and I split the truffle mashed potatoes (so named because they’re made with truffle oil).  It was all so very good. For dessert, we split the chocolate lava cake, which was actually a lot of cake with ice cream and Italian cookies or something.

So good.  On top of that, we also got a special anniversary treat:

That’s a box of four large chocolate truffles.  I’d like to say they were free truffles, but the reality is…we paid for those truffles, whether they were itemized on the bill or not. 😉  But we had a great time, regardless of the price–and hey, you’re 20th anniversary is kind of a big deal, isn’t it?

The next morning, our breakfast was a delicious frittata with fruit, ham, and a small piece of cinnamon bread that was just delicious.

All in all, it was a wonderful anniversary, and I was glad that we were able to get away for a short while to celebrate 20 years together. 

In case you’re wondering, yes, I did track everything I ate, in both My Fitness Pal and in the Weight Watchers eTools app. I ran Tuesday morning (or I should say I slogged through the 5 inches of fresh snow). That earned me seven Weight Watchers FitPoints, plus the 30 points I get in a normal day, for a total of 37 available to me. I tried to eat light for breakfast and lunch, but despite that, I still ended up using 55 points total for Tuesday. This meant I had to dip into my weekly points, of which I get 28. I normally don’t use them, because I find that I lose weight better without them, but it couldn’t be helped. 

One of the things I’d forgotten about the Weight Watchers method of tracking is that you get to carryover activity points instead of being forced to use them all on the day you earn them. This is different than My Fitness Pal, where you forfeit any calories you don’t “eat” in the day you burned them. Conversely, though, if you went over your calories one day in MFP, the next day, it was like you were starting over. There’s no real “penalty” for going over. 

I came to realize this week that the Weight Watchers way actually makes some sense. While I may not want to carry all those activity points over if I earn them but don’t use them, the opposite of that is that if I do go over my points or calories in a day, I shouldn’t just “reset” the next day as if it never happened.

I ran on Wednesday when we got back, doing the speed work that I had missed on Tuesday because of the snow. I also got a lot of steps in, because we had a hockey game Wednesday night, and I always get lots of steps in from going back and forth, taking all the pictures.  However, because of the way Weight Watchers works, those activity points were simply added back into my weekly point total (in an attempt to get it back up to 28), instead of being “available” to me to swap for food. Sure, if I didn’t care about my weekly points being used, I could’ve just eaten more food on Wednesday, as long as I didn’t run out of the remaining weekly points. But I know I’m not perfect during the week (I don’t weigh and measure as much as I should, and sometimes I’ll grab a “bite” of something and not count it–it’s just how I am!), so I figure not using the weeklies helps make up for my failings. 

I didn’t exercise yesterday, because Thursdays are my day off, so even though I ran 45 minutes this morning, I’m still down four weekly points (oops, make that 8; I just had some trail mix 😮 ). Will it kill me to use all my weekly points in a week? Of course not. But the fact that I can see that they aren’t at their full amount motivates me to want to try to burn more calories to get them back. Considering I’m running 10 miles in the morning, I think I’ll probably get there. 😉

Thanks for reading!