Eight Years

Dennis and I celebrated our anniversary this past weekend. We were married on October 6, 2001.

Traditionally Dennis has surprised me with something on our anniversary. This year was no exception and he held fast to his secret as I tried to pry it out of him with much conjoling, bribing and begging. Most of the begging was half-hearted- I didn't really want to find out!

We left the kids here with Grampa and Gramma and took off on Friday evening. Much can be deciphered based on which way the vehicle turns on the highway, but Dennis picked one of the directions I'm more unfamiliar with so I was still guessing an hour later.

We stopped in Belleville for supper (chinese) and were going to go to a movie. When we got up to the ticket kiosk we asked for two tickets to see the only movie we cared to see. "Um, we only have one ticket left for that movie," the girl told us. I told Dennis that he could go and that I would stand outside in the rain. He decide to forego the movie and we went to our favorite store in the world instead. Value Village. Oh, yeah. We are that classy. Value Village even on our anniversary- twice. Heh, heh.

After that Dennis said something about hopping in the car to go across the road. I wasn't sure what he meant and was still in the dark about our final destination. So I trustingly boarded our vehicle and he whizzed out onto the 401. "What about across the road?" I asked. Apparently it was all a ploy.

We headed down the highway and I could see that the signs were saying that Kingston was ahead. Having only been to Kingston a couple of times and most of those times were from the perspective of riding a bus, I really didn't know what was down there. We actually stopped at Napanee and grabbed some Tim Horton's on our way to a very nice hotel with a pool.

We were expecting rain all weekend, but the next day was beautiful- sunny and warm. I still didn't know what we were doing that day. We headed down the road another 30 minutes or so to Kingston. I got out the map with Dennis' permission and started speculating what we would be doing. I saw some interesting things on there and mentioned a couple to him. He didn't give me any clues.

Our first stop was Fort Henry. It was actually closed until the evening, but we were able to walk all around and enjoy the view. There was a ceremony taking place across the bay at the military college and some jets and a bomber flew overhead. We thought it was very kind of them to honor our anniversary in that way.

Later we went downtown and walked all around. It was very scenic and there was live music going on in a park, as well as people milling around and the smell of lots of food. We walked around for about 15 minutes trying to figure out what everyone was doing there. There didn't seem to be any signage or organization to the mass of people. Finally, I noticed a small piece of paper taped to one of the booths that said, "Chilifest." It all made sense then, and we started noticing all the people eating chili out of tiny bowls and the sea gulls eating up everything they dropped.

We were sitting on the pier looking out over the water when I saw some boats sitting there. I had mentioned the 1000 Island Cruises as a point of interest on the map to Dennis. As we sat there, I asked him if we could check out what they offered. He acted interested but kept putting me off everytime I tried to go over to the information building.

Finally, he just had to tell me that he had already reserved spaces on the 3 hour sunset dinner cruise that evening. I was over the moon!

Hardly containing my excitement, we headed off for lunch- I wasn't interested in chili. We ate at a nearby Cambodian/Thai restaurant. It was delicious.

On our way back to the car we were following a couple. The man who was quite tall stopped to look in the window of a men's clothing store. He thrust his head forward to get a better look at the goods displayed in the window. BANG. He hit his head on the glass, left a little sweaty head mark and made my day. I giggled all the way back to the van and am still laughing about it as I write. A friend once told me that I have affliction humor, and I think he must be right.

After visiting another Value Village and a Salvation Army and taking a quick snooze in the van, we went down to the dock to wait for our boat to board.

The trip was wonderful. We enjoyed a delicious buffet and spent a lot of time on the upper deck enjoying the scenary. Very romantic! The most interesting thing of the evening was the live musical entertainment. The guy performing the songs had quite the personality. We found him funny and entertaining, but we were able to escape to the top deck when he got to be a bit too much.

I am unable to upload pictures tonight for some reason. I'll try again another time.