Last year, November 15 wasn’t just Opening Day for regular firearms hunting season. It was also the 40th anniversary for Pam and me.

What with covid and everything, we weren’t going to celebrate by going on a cruise. We decided to repeat what we did on our 25th, which was to spend a night in a swanky suite at the Amway Grand and have a fabulously overpriced meal at a swanky restaurant.

Coincidentally, my employer, also Amway, had given me a gift card for a significant amount for the Amway Grand for having worked there for 25 years.

The suite that we booked was ducking huge. The bedroom was bigger than most hotel rooms that I’ve stayed in. So was the living room. The dining room was a bit smaller.

There was a plaque on the front door saying that Justin’s dad, Pierre Elliott, had stayed there back when he was Canada’s P.M. At least there wasn’t a plaque on the bathroom¹.

I fiddled with the room’s (suite’s) offerings for music for a while but I never got the darn things to work. There was none of this “pair it up with your phone on Bluetooth and start playing.” These were more like “install this, tweak that, install another bloody thing, and watch it not do anything useful.” Rather than waste too much time on this, we went to have a fabulously overpriced meal at a swanky restaurant.

The service at the swanky restaurant was outstanding. The staff became our best, if somewhat servile, friends. The food itself was kinda disappointing. It was pretty good but was only worth 2 digits of dollars and we were spending 3. I will concede that the cheese cake was the best that I’ve ever eaten. omfg!

By the time that we got back to our room, we hadn’t come up with a solution to the hotel’s music problem. We drove home, picked up a portable Bluetooth speaker, and got back to the hotel.

The point of all of this fussing with music was that this huge room gave us the first opportunity in a long time to do some dancing. We managed to get a few dances in. Unfortunately, we were so out of shape from not having danced for so long that we were soon exhausted.

The following day, we had breakfast at the hotel. This was ducking awful. We try to not think about that.

Overall, it was a wonderful night.

1. Anyone complaining that I’m plagiarizing Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal can complain to the U.S. president and then shut the heck up.