As of last Monday, we had been married for one full year. It's hard to believe that it's been that long already, but it was a very good year. It took a while to figure out what exactly to do for our 1st anniversary. We only have one 1st anniversary, so I wanted it to be special. Our first idea was to go to the San Juan Islands and stay at a Bed & Breakfast there, but everyone I talked to said that it would be too early in the year to go and it would be pretty cold and cloudy. Then we thought about going to eat at the Space Needle, but I didn't know what else to do besides go eat, so we scratched that idea. The weather during the week of our anniversary turned out to be cloudy, so it would have been pointless to go up there anyway. We did get a gift card to the Space Needle from my parents though, so we plan to go some day when it's really clear outside so we can see all of downtown, the water, and mountains in the distance.

But we still didn't have any plans for our anniversary. So, I started asking people at work what romantic things there are to do around here. Finally, one lady mentioned she was going to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival and that really sounded like a nice way to spend our anniversary, so we planned to do that and stay at a Bed & Breakfast overnight.

Since our anniversary was on a Monday, we ended up not doing much on the actual day. We ordered pizza and stayed home. I brought donuts home for Troy. They were from Top Pot Donuts, about two blocks from my office. I contributed to Co-Op America for part of Troy's present and also gave him a new beanie because he'd been wanting another one to wear besides his white Cowboys beanie. He gave me a nice bouquet of white roses and pink lilies, a DVD of Seasons 1 & 2 of the TV show Perfect Strangers, and a bar of Ghirardelli caramel-filled chocolate.

On Friday, we had planned to stay home since we'd be gone the rest of the weekend to the Tulip Festival. We played a few video games and then had a 4 course meal type thing. We started with cheese and some sparkling white wine, then ate salad, then we had salmon and pasta for dinner along with the rest of the wine. For dessert we had fresh fudge brownies with French vanilla ice cream and caramel topping. It was all so delicious! We also watched Atonement that we rented from Netflix.

Then, finally our actual anniversary plans had arrived. We left our apartment around 11. It actually snowed on the way up there. Here's pictures of the drive up there and of Camano Blossom Bed & Breakfast, about 54 miles north of Seattle and 15 miles southwest of the city of Mount Vernon, WA. Also included are pictures we took from Chuckanut Drive, which is a scenic drive that starts in Burlington and goes north via highway 11 to Bellingham. We'll have pictures and video of the tulips in the next post.