Our wedding anniversary was this past Saturday. To celebrate Jared and I planned a day trip to the Amana Colonies in eastern Iowa. It's a collection of seven villages comprised of descendants of German settlers. Basically they maintain an Amish lifestyle, living without the modern conveniences we all use on a daily basis.
It's a tourist destination known for its food, crafts, and wine.
We arrived in the early afternoon and immediately found our way to the wine sampling.
Delicious.
We ended up buying 18 bottles.
But before you email me a contact number for Al-Anon, 13 of those were requests from other people who knew we were making the trip.
People love this wine.
We hadn't been there more than 20 minutes when the sky clouded up. After loading our case(s) of wine and other impulse purchases into the car, we decided to spend the storm cozied up at a restaurant enjoying some authentic German food.
Lunch was wiener schnitzel served family style with other traditional German side dishes. It was also delicious.
Unfortunately our plan to wait out the storm didn't exactly pan out. As we made a dash for the nearest shop after eating, sheets of rain came down and within seconds we were drenched. I am not exaggerating when I say it looked like we both just stepped out of a swimming pool.
Soooo that brings me to this classy picture.
Which Jared really did not want to take, but hey - it's a memory right?
I do especially love how the glare off the poncho makes you look about 50 pounds heavier.
But thank God for those $1.75 ponchos because it rained for three hours like that.
We managed to make it as fun as possible.
We ate homemade fudge.
Sampled some cheeses.
Bought German noodles and some pastry.
(Anyone noticing a trend here?)
We browsed cute shops.
There was no leisurely walking or window shopping. It was serious business: rush in the rain from store to store, poncho on, head down.
After finally tiring of all the dismal running around in the rain, we drove to our hotel. Jared went to check in while I waited in the car. It took forever! Thirty minutes later Jared emerges to tell me that they overbooked our room.
You have got to be kidding me...
And since there were no more regular room available, we were upgraded to a king suite instead - free of charge. And along with that, they comped our entire stay. We didn't pay a cent for our room.
Now we're talkin'!
The room was amazing - by far the nicest one I have ever been in. It was huge. Much more than we needed for one night, but I was not complaining! I was pretty pumped about it... and then I saw the bathtub.
It. was. massive.
And because I am a child of the 90's, I saw that tub and instantly thought, "I will be having a "Pretty Woman" moment tonight!"
Cut to a few hours later...
There is no bubble bath to be found anywhere, so we decide that a bottle or two of the hotel shampoo might do the trick.
And it worked just fine.
And then Jared turned on the jets and walked away while the tub continued to fill...
I walk in to find two feet of bubbles on top of the bath water.
It was ridiculous. We basically flooded the bathroom with bubbles. When Jared sat down, I couldn't even see him because the bubbles enveloped him completely.
(This random crap never happened to Julia Roberts.)
And these bubbles lasted for h-o-u-r-s!
I hadn't laughed that hard in a while. I think we both felt like 3 year-olds. Not exactly what I was originally going for, but really, the whole day was like that.
It wasn't exactly what we had planned on - torrential downpours or bathroom bubble flooding, but that is what makes great memories.
