Fifth Anniversary Celebration

Travalon and I had a wonderful fifth wedding anniversary weekend. We started by having lobster-stuffed salmon at Mariner's on Friday night, our actual anniversary. Saturday we drove to North Freedom, taking the Merrimac ferry. Here is a shot from the ferry:

We went to the Mid-Continent Railway Museum to ride the pizza train. I made a really good movie of the train coming into the station, but the blog won't let me post it because it is just over a minute long. One minute seems to be the cutoff. You will have to console yourselves with a photo of Travalon in front of a Great Northern rail car.

Then we drove to Mequon, stopping along the way at Astico County Park outside of Columbus for a hike.  Mequon is where we stayed at the Sybaris Pool Suites hotel. This is a shot of the pool in our room with the "tropical waterfall" running.

And here is a video of it running.

But we didn't swim with all those bright lights on - we turned them off and just had the pool lights on, which danced around and changed from blue to green. Here is a video of that.

If you think staying at a hotel with your own private pool is romantic, you are right about that! It is just as fun as you can imagine. After we swam, we used the jacuzzi and the steam room, then we took a break for chocolate-covered strawberries and champagne, and then we swam some more. After that we each sat in the massage chair and had a massage. So relaxing!

This morning we had leftover champagne and Chinese from our dinner last night at Hong Ahn Palace (highly recommended), then we got coffee at a place called Fiddleheads and went for a hike at a county park called Virmond. It had beautiful views overlooking Lake Michigan, like this:

Then we went to another branch of Fiddleheads for matcha lattes and sat out by the Milwaukee River:

We went to Oconomowoc to visit Travalon's mother, and we played Scrabble with her. She used up all her letters in one turn and got an extra 50 points! Of course she won the game after that, but surprisingly we were all pretty close in our scores. We got back to town in time to go to 5:00 Mass at our usual parish. The reader read the wrong reading for the second reading, and I thought, "Oh well, maybe nobody will notice," but then the homily was more about that reading than the Gospel. So what, that is a funny ending to a wonderful weekend. Here's to many more anniversary celebrations!

Famous Hat