A special day

i try not to do too much personal stuff on here preferring to keep it to business, but I wanted to share something about yesterday.

Valentine's Day is extra special to us because it's the day we arrived in San Diego to live for one year - which turned into 4 1/2 years!!  My memories of that day are so mixed - first we left Sydney and all that was familiar.  Our life was packed into a shipping container and enroute somewhere in the ocean (scary thought), the dog was boarding for 3 weeks before her flight to join us, and we were saying goodbye to all our friends and family and going to a place where we knew no-one.  Quite daunting.

We arrived in SD around lunch time only to find that the keys to the vehicle we were to have for the next month or two were back in Sydney with a business colleague (he'd taken them by accident!).  That meant what was to have been a quick 5 minute trip to our rented accommodation was now over an hour with two taxi's back and forth.  An emotional arrival at the rented condo with two tired small children (7 & 4) and all the bags followed by an afternoon nap - we were all exhausted.

That evening, with no groceries in the condo and no keys to drive the car anywhere, we went out for dinner.  Remember it was also Valentine's Day.  We went to a small restaurant called Voyage in the community of Little Italy where we were to spend the next few years.  It was lovely - despite the tiredness, homesickness and sense of upheaval. 

That began our tradition of going out for dinner on Valentine's Day as a family rather than as a couple.  All the years we were in SD we dined at Voyage, later to become Zia's Bistro on India Street.   Last year, our first back in Sydney, we went to Pellegrini's in Balmain.  Nice enough, but not quite what we wanted.

This year, Matthew surprised us by booking a mystery restaurant in Neutral Bay, coincidentally in the building that he worked in when I met him many, many years ago.   It turned out to be a nice surprise - it was an American restaurant called Blue Plate.  We had a lovely meal and giggled and reminisced about our great American adventure.    There were some old favourite dishes on the menu that we need to go back to try - not least of which was the Fish tacos, a San Diego dish.  And the lychee Cosmopolitan went down very well!
To top it off our waitress was from Orange County, just north of San Diego!

It may become an annual event, you never know!

Thanks for indulging me on my journey down memory lane!!

Karen