Party time

Another year, another birthday. Well, not yet - it's next week.

Growing up we didn't make a big deal of celebrating birthdays. Of course, there would always be a cake with candles at family dinner and a token gift. We didn't do the big bashes kids have today with 70 screaming children hopped up on sugar and running wild at laser tag or whatever.

When I got married I expected a similar celebration from my husband - thoughtful gift and a token celebration. Since thinking ahead and planning romantic anythings is completely out of his comfort zone, my birthday was disappointing the first few years of marriage. I get that I may be hard to shop for, but more than that is that my expectations were unrealistic to the personality type I married. 

Enter Brilliant Plan of 2015. We decided that since we never go anywhere or do anything, since our favorite activity is being lazy together at home binge watching TV, we should use birthdays to visit new places. The birthday person would plan their perfect trip and we would go together. 

Last year my birthday was on a Sunday and to save on cash we decided to make it into a day trip instead of an overnighter. It worked out so well. We went to Philadelphia and spent the day touring. Among other things we visited the Liberty Bell and were surprised at how small it was. I made sure to point out that we would never have known that if we didn't see it in person because it always looked so big in pictures! Wasn't it supposed to be bigger? Also, should we tell someone there's a crack in it?

We splurged on dinner at a fancy restaurant and headed home. It was only a 2 hr ride away and we always said we would visit but we hadn't been able to get our lazy butts out of the house any other day. Not only did we have a lovely time, but I also felt thoroughly celebrated on my birthday. 

This year is a little different. I wanted to go to Florida for my birthday. I miss the beach. It's such an easy trip and there are so many great restaurants. My husband hasn't been to Florida since I ran the Miami Half Marathon in 2012 so he was on board even thought it's not a new place. We made the plans in the fall and started looking forward to the trip. 

Since then, zika virus broke out. Even though I haven't heard much about it recently, there is no way I'm going through all this fertility treatment to try to have a healthy baby only to compromise it with getting the zika virus. So Florida was out. In fact, any place down south was out - I don't know where those crazy mosquitoes are breeding! Not risking it.

We also can't really visit the West coast because we only planned a few days off work and didn't want to spend most of them on an airplane. So we were limited to the upper right quadrant of the United States. After much searching online, considering the weather, debating locations, we picked a place and have it booked for next week! I'll post pictures and details when we get back. Happy almost birthday to me!