Toni and I celebrated our 8th (or was it 9th?) anniversary this weekend; though officially our Anniversary isn't until tomorrow (May 1st). We had a great time. Our baby sitter/nanny, Gail, came over around 2pm on Saturday to watch the kids overnight, until Sunday afternoon.
I don't think we had been away from the kids for that long since Toni's parents visited two summers ago and watched the kids overnight for us while we spent the night at a Bed & Breakfast on Orcas Island.
We started our anniversary celebration by going Kayaking on Elliott Bay, just off of Alki Beach in Seattle. We rented a two-seater kayak and paddled around the freezing, clear green waters of the bay. We watched some sea lions sunning on a giant buoy secured near the middle of the bay, and made our way up near Duwamish Head, then back to the pier.
After working up an appetite we grabbed a quick snack of fish and chips, and a crab cocktail - keeping it light so that we didn't ruin our appetites for dinner that evening.
Rather than heading directly to the hotel we drove around Alki and West Seattle, looking at the homes and smaller neighborhoods, dreaming about what it would be like to live there.
We then made our way to the hotel - The Edgewater - located on the Puget Sound waterfront in Seattle. Interestingly enough, and though I didn't know it at the time, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles stayed at the hotel in the 60's. Anyway, the hotel was fantastic. The room was very cozy, with a nice fireplace and a great view of forklift sitting on the peir next to the hotel...oh and a great view of the rest of the Sound too. :-)
We decided not to eat at the hotel's restaruant after checking out it's menu and the atmoshphere. Instead we headed to Queen Anne and ate at a place Toni had recently read a really good review for: How to Cook a Wolf.
We got lucky and found a great seat at the bar in the otherwise small and completely packed restaraunt. The entire place only had about five dinner tables, with additional seating for about twelve at the bar. Our seat was at the far end of the bar, and gave us a perfect view into the kitchen in front of us where we could watch the chef cook our meal.
Toni and I hate eating at pretentious restaraunts, but we were very happy to find that though this place was very nice, it was also quite relaxing.
The food was absolutely incredible. The dishes were extremely simple. But all of the ingredients were paired perfectly. For appetizers we had the chick pea salad and baked polenta. Toni had the pappardelle and I had the spaghetti...all cooked perfectly - one of the best meals we've ever had.
Afterwards we walked around Queen Anne and did a little bit of window shopping. One of the stores we visited was a large game shop called Blue Highway Games. They sell board games and such made from around the world. The shop has a very large space and loft area for customers to play games. They also host nightly and weekly games of various types. Very cool. We spent a lot of time looking around.
We then returned to the hotel, ordered dessert from room service, and watched an incredibly bad-but-good horror movie, Shrooms, about some kids that travel to Ireland to camp out and trip on mushrooms.
That morning we ordered breakfast from room service (which was really tasty), then checked out.
We decided to make our way back to Queen Anne to check out Blue Highway Games again. The game store reminded a lot of this place back in Pensecola, FL, called Kolbe's (sp?). It was filled with all kinds of neat games and puzzles like this place. I remember visiting it with Hervey and my friends to check out their AD&D wares. I was totally infatuated with the huge selection of D&D dice they had.
This time Toni and I found an interesting two player game called Blue Moon to play. We sat down and worked our way through the instructions for about 20 minutes and ended up playing for an hour or so. It was a lot of fun.
Of course, by that time, we were ready for lunch, so we headed across the street to a nice pizza place where we had a delicious small pizza with gornonzola and prosciutto. Once we had finished we were missing the kids, a bit tired, and ready to head home...
...but we decided to drive around Queen Anne for a bit first and look at homes for sell - mostly just dreaming again about owning a cozy little home in a nice neighborhood in Seattle.
I have to say that it was the perfect 24 hour anniversary celebration. I'm looking forward to our next opportunity to get out.