Such a lovely place

In a shocking turn of events, Shane and I managed a kidfree night for our anniversary. Shocking because, well, our last kidfree night was spent walking the halls of the hospital while I labored with Luke. Does that count? I'm thinking not. Don't get me wrong, though, this has been completely by choice. Although Luke started to have occasional sleepovers at my parents' house after he turned three, we like to have both boys at home with us--especially with Tommy's health and sleep issues and general state of being attached t ome. Luke has been asking to do a sleepover with my husband's parents for awhile now and when we asked about it, Grandma offered to take both boys. Kind of hard to turn down, especially when I found a Living Social deal for a hotel not too far from us.

So, away we went. Not without a great deal of hand-wringing and separation anxiety. From us, of course. The boys were just fine, especially this little traitor who could barely contain his excitement.

As we pulled away, the boys barely glancing in our direction, I punched in the address for the hotel and aws given this message.

Permanently closed!? Whatchoo talking 'bout, Mapquest? I had just confirmed our reservation and just bought a Living Social deal, so I ignored Mapquest. Except that when we got off the interstate, Shane was all, Look at that closed down hotel! And I was like, That's our hotel.

And then Shane went on this rant about how you cannot trust the internet and this is why you need to go by good old fashioned word of mouth recommendation and I was all, SIMMER DOWN, THE PARKING LOT IS FULL. Fortunately, the inside was really nice and clean, so I won this round of the internet is not evil. I'm not sure what's going on with the outside and the lack of a sign, but we had this waiting on our bed, causing my heart to be completely won over by Hotel Indigo.

I really didn't take a good picture of our room, but I liked that it was very bright and airy. I also liked that the floor was wood, instead of carpet. Hotel carpet always feels so dirty to me, but this was nice and clean. I did get a small snippet of the room in the back of my obligatory dinner date mirror shot.

Speaking of dinner, we had an amazing meal at Bob Chinn's Crabhouse, recommended by a wonderful twitter friend. I think there are three types of people when it comes to seafood: people who eat almost anything that comes from the water, people who don't really like fish but will eat fried shrimp or fish sticks, and people who don't eat seafood at all. I'm in the first group (except for an aversion to tuna that comes from preparing mass quantities of tuna salad when I worked at Subway) and so is Shane, so we were in heaven. Even moreso when the waitress set this giant mai tai in front of me.

She assured me that it would last me the whole meal, but I didn't really believe her. Except that it did and I ended up having Shane finish it. This never happens with me and drinks. I will be dreaming about this meal for a long time... steamed crabs with drawn butter, red potatoes, and a giant cupcake for dessert.

We started the next morning with a breakfast buffet and I wanted to take a picture of my plate, piled high with eggs and bacon and sausage and potatoes and my other plate piled high with pancakes, but I kind of ate it too fast and here is my empty plate. Oops.

And then, even though checkout wasn't until 1pm and there was lots of fabulous shopping in the area, we were on the road by 9AM and back to our boys. Although Tommy launched himself into my arms, they were full of stories about donuts for breakfast and I'm pretty sure we missed them more than they missed us!