Celebrating Six Looked Something Like This

Yesterday was our sixth anniversary. (You can click here to read my oh-so-amazing post about six years of marriage if you haven't seen it yet.) We celebrated early by leaving the kids with our friends on Friday night and heading into Toronto for some anniversary celebrations. Not completely unlike our marriage, we had made plans and some of them worked, and some of them didn't.

We got to our hotel and, since we were a little short on time we decided to drive to our restaurant of choice instead of taking public transit. And then we realized our restaurant was smack dab in the middle of Gay Pride celebrations. And not only Gay Pride celebrations for Toronto, but for the World. I guess a different city is chosen every year for World Pride Day and Toronto was the choice for this year. I wish I had know that before we planned our anniversary celebrations.

Needless to say, trying to find parking was a nightmare and when we finally found (way overpriced parking) we had to run, through all the Pride celebrations (think concerts, food booths, lots of people taking over the street) to get to our restaurant. It was crazy.

Our restaurant of choice was O.Noir where you eat Completely. In. The. Dark. It was weird. It was unique. It was bizarre. Close your eyes, stay that way for over two hours, and eat a meal. We went with Donny and Marika and I'm glad it wasn't just the two of us. We made a lot of inane conversation just so we weren't sitting quietly in the dark.

After making our way back to our parking garage, through all the Pride celebrations, I asked Marika to take a picture of us. Sadly, the parking garage had the "best" lighting at this point. Ha!

The next morning, after not being completely satisfied by the "free hotel breakfast," we stopped at Starbucks and then headed to our next adventure.

We had arranged to try stand up paddleboarding on Lake Ontario. After running up and down the lakefront for half an hour looking for the tent where we were supposed to meet our tour, getting increasingly hot, sweaty, and stressed, Dave got the cell phone (which he had left in the car) and called the people, only to find out it had been cancelled due to a high concentration of e.coli in the water. That's what you get for trying to disconnect from e-mail for a whole eighteen hours. Blah.

While we didn't want to get e.coli, we were rather disappointed to not get to try stand up paddleboarding. I ended up reading on a bench at the lakefront, while Dave practiced his photography skills.

Then we continued on with the rest of our day which included lunch at Panera Bread, shopping for some new work clothes for Dave, picking up our anniversary present from my parents (a new spade!!!), and picking up Sam and Rachel.

So yeah, our anniversary outing didn't turn out quite like we expected. It was a little more crazy, frustrating, weird, and relaxing than we had planned, but we had fun anyway. And like our marriage, it was better because we were in it together.