A Tale Of Valentines Day And Mexican Food.

Every husband and wife have stories to tell, it's inevitable, but there's always one or two that are standouts. This one goes down as one of the most memorable for Sal and I.

While the kids were still at home, Sally and I used to take off for special occasions for a night or two, sometimes at a bed and breakfast in some little town that we'd want to check out and on this particular Valentines Day, that was our venue.

We'd went to Hannibal, MO for the weekend, a cool little town on the Mississippi river about an hour or so from our place. We got a room at a Bed and Breakfast in one of the old restored and renovated mansions up on the hills above the town and the river. We hit the antique stores and did some shopping, had lunch at a favorite restaurant there of ours, Lulu Belle's, a restaurant that was at one time a turn of the century brothel. Excellent food and "interesting" decor. We shopped some more, went out to the river and watched it go by for awhile and decided to go eat dinner at a mexican restaurant that we'd seen earlier in the day.

Here is a point in the story that I'd like to just stop and make a recommendation to one and all... based on my experience. When you're out for a romantic getaway weekend with your sweetie, last choice for your evening meal should be any kind of mexican food.

Seriously.

We grabbed a bottle of wine on our way back to the B and B, went to our room, complete with a spa, set up the ambiance for the evening with some candles around the room... basically the whole nine yards.

Now this being a very very old house, the walls were thin, and particularly the walls in our bathroom, which was more of an afterthought than an actual bathroom. I honestly think it was originally a closet and they just threw in the appropriate porcelain and called her good.

Throw into this little fracas the fact that the guests in the next room were separated only by this thin wall, and the door that went between their room and ours was blocked by a huge armoire thing, that was shoved up against it unmovable.

Being brand new newlyweds of less than a year, "things" weren't as open as say a couple that had been together a number of years, in the area of (I'm trying to be polite here) normal body sounds. The kind of normal body sounds that happen to a man after a big mexican dinner. Oh yes.... those sounds.

Here is where I learn that we ate the wrong dinner, Cousin. Wrong wrong wrong, oh so very wrong. The wrongest. I excused myself to the paper wall bathroom to gain some relief and trying my damnedest to be discreet and not reduce an evening of romance to what a group of 5th grade boys would find to be the highest form of entertainment and humor.

See... now, still here I thought that I was being quiet. No, I was not. Sally can do the best interpretation of what took place behind that bathroom door, she's had years of practicing it when telling this story. It started out high pitched, much like a baby crying down a long hallway, then switching off to the quacking of a nervous duck, with interjections of a backfiring Model A, interspersed with polite breaks in the cacophony to pause and regroup, only to start all over again.

My beautiful bride of less than a year, just on the other side of this door, had her face buried in a pillow, almost to the point of self suffocation, trying to muffle her laughter... knowing full well what I was dealing with.

Then my friends, I had a realization. A harsh and cruel one to a man in my dire predicament... I heard the couple in the next room bust out in what can only be described as gut wrenching laughter.

I froze in mid squeak. And then, just to cinch the deal, I heard Sally come completely unhinged. I sat there in the darkness trying to think of some way to explain this whole thing off, but there was no way to explain it... other than what had actually just happened. I slowly opened the door, Sally was crying with laughter. The people in the next room were completely undone. I was had.

We laughed about it and I got over my embarrassment but told Sally that when we left the next morning that I wanted to bail outta there at the crack of dawn just so we didn't run into the people in the next room.

You can guess what happened next... as I was carrying our luggage out to the car, I rapidly greeted our neighbors good morning as I met them in the common living room of the B and B and heard them snicker as they walked on past.

We've had lots of wonderful weekends together since then, but none that go down the way that one did.