Happy Anniversary

Please note: If you're linking here from a goal update, this is our second trip. Our first is here.

Today is the one-year annivesary of when Heidi and I met in person. She came to see the play I was in, and we hit it off over a Belgian beer with Matt, Lisa and Cori. Anyway, what we did to celebrate was go to Galena. We stayed at the Irish Cottage Hotel, which was amazing. I've very rarely had such splendid service at a hotel, to say nothing of the entertainment. They had a (moderately) authentic Irish Pub connected to the builidng. The pub-ness of it was authentic, but most pubs in Ireland aren't quite so big. We got to listen to a whole mess of fantastic Irish music by a few different folks, the lead of which sounded freakin' exactly like Chief O'Brien from the Star Trek series (Next Generation and DS9). He was the lead, but the star of the show was this 15 year old kid who was wailing on his fiddle, while the guys with decades more experience were just barely keeping up with him. In the morning, we went right back to the pub to have probably the most authentic Irish breakfast you can get in Illinois, and then headed into town for a bit of shopping and fun and cool stuff. We had scoped out the places the evening before, but a lot of the stores close early in Galena, so there really wasn't a lot to see or do the previous evening (except go back and drink and listen to Irish music). Anyway, a couple of our choices for the first places to hit were a chocolate shop and a cheese shop (yes, I was making today my free day from the diet instead 0f tomorrow). The chocolate shop was expensive, but exquisite. We both liked everything we had from there, but the wine-based chocolates (the port and the bordeaux) were stunning. The cheese shop was less impressive than we thought it would be, but Heidi managed to find Wallace & Gromit Wensleydale Cheese. Rock on! We did a little wine tasting at a sparsely-but-interestingly stocked wine shop, and then we stopped in to a toy store. This had all the kitschy old toys that people had grown up with, and a few newer things. I was tempted to get their Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots game, but didn't succumb. We ended up getting some "Bubb-a-loons," which are little tubes of highly toxic-smelling gel, that you blow up into balloons. Heidi had grown up playing with it, and I had never heard of it, so we got some, so she could school me. When we got back to her parents' place, we made a small balloon sculpture that smelled like a cross between model glue and gasoline. Anyway, we ended the day having satay over at Heidi's folks house, and enjoying the fact that we could tolerate and enjoy one another's company for a whole year.

Update: I just realized, two days after I posted that, that the beer mentioned in the first thought was misspelled. It's Belgian, as in from Belgium, not Beligan, which could be mistaken for an obscure local brand.