our anniversary

...was interesting. Weekend recap:

We left Thursday night to drive up to my parent's house. It took us forever to pack the car b/c of all the dog's stuff, and then we realized that he had outgrown his kennel. So, we had to go to PetsMart to get him a seatbelt harness for the car. We finally got to my parent's house about 10, and then sat around and chatted for awhile. My parents had to leave really early in the morning for their flight to NC, so we hit the sack relatively early.

Friday morning we drove up to Schaumburg for Jason’s dentist appointment, and the weather was insane! Torrential rain, and really strong winds. It wasn’t like that at my parent’s house at all, but closer to the city got totally hammered. After the dentist, I dropped Jason off at home, and went to lunch with a good friend of mine. We sat there for two hours just chatting away, and it was so great! Friday night we just putsed around at home (my parent's house).

Saturday morning we got up and played with the dog/did some homework. We left about 12:15 for our 2:00 show. Here’s where the angry faces start. It only took us about 45 minutes to get into the city, so we were anticipating plenty of time to get to the show. For those of you familiar with Chicago, we were on Lower-Wacker on our way to Navy Pier, and we turned the wrong way on Lakeshore Drive, because I wasn’t paying attention. So, we were just going to turn around, but every single one of the roads intersecting with LSD was closed b/c of some concert!!! We literally had to drive about 2 or 3 miles to find a road to turn around on. I know 3 miles isn’t much, but the traffic was bumper to bumper, 10 mph. After about 30 minutes on LSD the wrong way, we were finally able to turn around. It was the same bumper to bumper back south. We made it to navy pier about 2:05, and our show was at 2:00. :( Then we started trying to find a parking space—that was a laugh. We had to drive all the way to the top of the parking garage to find a space. We got back downstairs about 2:15. Then we started asking where the theatre was. Anyway, we were told like 8 different things, so we wandered around trying to find it. Finally, hot and frustrated, we gave up about 2:40. It was only a 90 minute show, so we had already missed 1/3 of it. We made our way back to the car, and squeaked out of the garage only 2 minutes before we had been there an hour (the first hour is free, after that it’s $24 dollars). So, then we had almost 3 hours to kill before our dinner reservation. I called my uncle, who lives in the city, and he told us about Taste of Randolph that was going on, on the street where our restaurant was. Great! Something to do.

So, we drove there, and after looking for parking for 10 minutes, finally found a valet parking for $10 (cheap for the city!). We walked up to the festival, which we assumed was free, but then were told it was $10 each to get in. So we forked over another $20. As soon as we were through, we found out it was a suggested donation. Argh!! Anyway, we started wandering around the street festival, and come to find out that everything cost an insane amount of money. There wasn’t anything to do in the festival that was free. Nothing. So, we were getting really annoyed. It was super hot, we were all dressed up, missed our show, and spent $30 for literally nothing. There's no way we could have known what it would be like ahead of time, nor could my uncle. So, oh well. We sat down on the sidewalk, and stayed there for an hour. Then I spotted a starbucks, so we went and sat in starbucks for another 30 minutes until our reservation. We were both so sick and tired, and just wanted to go home. But, we made it to Marche, and sat down, and that was the start of a better experience. The food was excellent, and the atmosphere was great. It was delish! We had $100 gift certificate, and our food alone cost $100 just for the two of us!! We ended up spending another $50 of our own money for tax, tip, and my glass of wine. Obviously that was a one-time experience :) After we got home, we ate some of our cake, which was still yummy a year later.

On Sunday, we were doing homework when I went on facebook to take a break. We realized that there had been a tornado while we were gone!! We were dreading coming home to a flooded basement, and a tree limb through our roof. We decided to get going because I was pretty nervous about it. When we got home, we were praising Jesus that our basement was DRY, and we only had some smallish limbs down in our yard, not on our house. WOW! What a blessing.So, this weekend was crazy. Jason said, “Well, I guess this means that our future anniversaries can’t be any worse (minus the yummy food).” LOL. What can we do but laugh about how ridiculous our anniversary was? Oh well. It’s just another day, right?