Wekend review (10 year anniversary)
Despite my fear that the weekend would be rather blah, compared to how important it is, it turned out to be quite spectacular. Saturday started out kind of early. We thought Doug needed to do some work for a friend of his this weekend, but it turned out that the work was requested for the following weekend. Either way, it got us out of bed. We spent the afternoon cooking various tasty things, like humus and pudding, then spent the rest of the afternoon sunning while burgers were grilling on the BBQ 
We ate the food while watching "Pretty Woman" (Doug apparently has never seen it before), and later that evening went to see the local Catonsville fireworks. We parked a bit of a ways off, but the walk was fairly short, and we were able to get almost front seat view of the show. We could even see the people with road flares running around on the field below, lighting the mortar fuses.
Sunday we slept in till about noon, then went to a few grown-up toy stores (Home Depot and Best Buy), and then went to downtown Baltimore harbor for our dinner cruise (Spirit Cruise). I bought tickets for it a while ago as a surprise to Doug for our anniversary, but it surprised both of us. The atmosphere was quite more relaxed than I thought it would be. Instead of being seated with a group, we got our own private window seat, and felt as if we were getting special treatment. The hosts knew it was our anniversary, and we heard congratulations a few times. They even announced our anniversary, along with everyone else's who was celebrating theirs. Our 10 years, what we thought was a long time, turned out to be the shortest there, with next one being 13 years, and ones after that being 25 to 35. Doug joked that 10 years is actually a VERY long time in "gay years" for a relationship to last. The views were quite interesting. Perhaps not very romantic, but we saw parts of the harbor and bay that we've never seen before. I didn't even know most of that stuff was out there. Upstairs was a big open area to walk around and enjoy the view, which we did a few times, but the weather was surprisingly cold for July - even in dress pants and shirts - so we didn't spent a lot of time there.
Regarding the service, a few things rather surprised us. First, we were quite surprised at how ok they were with us being a gay couple. It was all smiles and nods, without so much as a weirded-out look, even while we were on the upper deck, arms wrapped around each other, being really close. Second, after we had the dinner and went up outside to enjoy the view, after a few minutes our server James actually tracked us down out there, with a tray of two desert plates, asking if we would like to enjoy our desert outside. We said no (it was too cold), but I've never had anyone track me down like that, with desert, before. I expected they would either wait until we came back, or just leave the food on our table, not actually look for us, find us, and bring it to us. The stuff on the plates looked delicious, too (some sort of chocolate mousse thing, and cheesecake), so we chased after James back down to our table to enjoy it.
The last part really floored us. Doug's word, "dumbstruck" is even more fitting. One of the features of this dinner cruise is a DJ and some dancing after dinner (line dancing, which we didn't participate in). Near the beginning of our trip, James, our server, asked us if we had a song that he could request the DJ to play for us later. We said that it's a bit obscure, and doubted the DJ had a copy of it on his laptop, so said "thanks, but don't worry about it." (FYI, it was Sway, by Anita Kelsey http://bit.ly/12UO50) To our completely astonished surprise, after dinner was over and music and dance was about to begin, James came out to introduce some of the other servers that will be entertaining us that evening, and then saying he'll sing something first, actually started singing the song Sway by himself. And he was GOOD! He acted it out and intoned it well while teasing some of the women, and Doug and I could do nothing else but gape and stare, thinking OMG How?!?!?! I wish I had turned on my PDA and hit the audio record button, but we were just too surprised as soon as we heard the base and piano play the first few notes of the song. All in all, that was like a huge sweet cherry on top of an otherwise perfect evening. Later on we told James that the song he sung was actually our what-we-thought-was-obscure song, and thanked him for it.
The rest of the cruise was mostly just hanging out and enjoying the views on the upper deck while people below line-danced. Upon disembarking the cruise, we were given fresh baked cookies, then spent another hour or so walking around the harbor area, and finally headed home. All in all, our 10 year celebration of being together was quite apt for the occasion.
Oh, I also got a flickr account at http://flickr.com/rassah, and will be using that to post more photos of our weekend, as well as any future events and trips *coughITALYcough* I spent part of the weekend uploading all we had so far: 3,133 photos O.o! Fang said we travel all the time, I didn't think so (since it's mostly just to Florida or nearby in the States), but now I'm kind of starting to agree with him.
We ate the food while watching "Pretty Woman" (Doug apparently has never seen it before), and later that evening went to see the local Catonsville fireworks. We parked a bit of a ways off, but the walk was fairly short, and we were able to get almost front seat view of the show. We could even see the people with road flares running around on the field below, lighting the mortar fuses.
Sunday we slept in till about noon, then went to a few grown-up toy stores (Home Depot and Best Buy), and then went to downtown Baltimore harbor for our dinner cruise (Spirit Cruise). I bought tickets for it a while ago as a surprise to Doug for our anniversary, but it surprised both of us. The atmosphere was quite more relaxed than I thought it would be. Instead of being seated with a group, we got our own private window seat, and felt as if we were getting special treatment. The hosts knew it was our anniversary, and we heard congratulations a few times. They even announced our anniversary, along with everyone else's who was celebrating theirs. Our 10 years, what we thought was a long time, turned out to be the shortest there, with next one being 13 years, and ones after that being 25 to 35. Doug joked that 10 years is actually a VERY long time in "gay years" for a relationship to last. The views were quite interesting. Perhaps not very romantic, but we saw parts of the harbor and bay that we've never seen before. I didn't even know most of that stuff was out there. Upstairs was a big open area to walk around and enjoy the view, which we did a few times, but the weather was surprisingly cold for July - even in dress pants and shirts - so we didn't spent a lot of time there.
Regarding the service, a few things rather surprised us. First, we were quite surprised at how ok they were with us being a gay couple. It was all smiles and nods, without so much as a weirded-out look, even while we were on the upper deck, arms wrapped around each other, being really close. Second, after we had the dinner and went up outside to enjoy the view, after a few minutes our server James actually tracked us down out there, with a tray of two desert plates, asking if we would like to enjoy our desert outside. We said no (it was too cold), but I've never had anyone track me down like that, with desert, before. I expected they would either wait until we came back, or just leave the food on our table, not actually look for us, find us, and bring it to us. The stuff on the plates looked delicious, too (some sort of chocolate mousse thing, and cheesecake), so we chased after James back down to our table to enjoy it.
The last part really floored us. Doug's word, "dumbstruck" is even more fitting. One of the features of this dinner cruise is a DJ and some dancing after dinner (line dancing, which we didn't participate in). Near the beginning of our trip, James, our server, asked us if we had a song that he could request the DJ to play for us later. We said that it's a bit obscure, and doubted the DJ had a copy of it on his laptop, so said "thanks, but don't worry about it." (FYI, it was Sway, by Anita Kelsey http://bit.ly/12UO50) To our completely astonished surprise, after dinner was over and music and dance was about to begin, James came out to introduce some of the other servers that will be entertaining us that evening, and then saying he'll sing something first, actually started singing the song Sway by himself. And he was GOOD! He acted it out and intoned it well while teasing some of the women, and Doug and I could do nothing else but gape and stare, thinking OMG How?!?!?! I wish I had turned on my PDA and hit the audio record button, but we were just too surprised as soon as we heard the base and piano play the first few notes of the song. All in all, that was like a huge sweet cherry on top of an otherwise perfect evening. Later on we told James that the song he sung was actually our what-we-thought-was-obscure song, and thanked him for it.
The rest of the cruise was mostly just hanging out and enjoying the views on the upper deck while people below line-danced. Upon disembarking the cruise, we were given fresh baked cookies, then spent another hour or so walking around the harbor area, and finally headed home. All in all, our 10 year celebration of being together was quite apt for the occasion.
Oh, I also got a flickr account at http://flickr.com/rassah, and will be using that to post more photos of our weekend, as well as any future events and trips *coughITALYcough* I spent part of the weekend uploading all we had so far: 3,133 photos O.o! Fang said we travel all the time, I didn't think so (since it's mostly just to Florida or nearby in the States), but now I'm kind of starting to agree with him.