My Favorite Valentine’s Day — Ever

This year Bixie and I decided to pack up Gus and fly to San Diego for the long Valentine’s Day weekend. Gus is no stranger to flying at this point; readers of this blog know he jets about the country fairly regularly. He’s almost eight months old and has already flown a whopping five times.

We stayed at the Hyatt in Mission Bay (about a half mile from Seaworld) and had a terrific suite that had two rooms – one for a sleeping baby and the other for (gently) partying parents.

By day we frolicked at one of the three pools on the resort. Bixie slathered up Gus’s porky white body with SPF 4 Billion and topped him off with a tropical-themed Gilligan’s Island hat. He seemed to like going into the pool once the shock of a lower temperature morphed into the joy of splashing.

Gus poolside

But I think my favorite part of the mini-vacation was Valentine’s night. The resort boasted a 4 or 5 star restaurant called the Red Marlin, which sat on pillars at the mouth of the harbor. Colorful sails and gentle waves and swaying palm trees were on the viewing menu – that is, if you’d had the foresight to make a dinner reservation weeks in advance.

And we hadn’t. Mostly that’s because we know Gus is typically counting sheep by 6:30 p.m., but also because we didn’t put pressure on ourselves this year to have the big fancy dinner. Just being away was enough.

We went up to the huge deck of the Red Marlin to have a drink and maybe a couple of appetizers before the dinner crowd showed up, but we were told by a waiter that the bar menu wasn’t available that night due to all of the Valentine’s Day prep – but he would check to be sure.

So we resigned ourselves to having a drink next to the roaring fire pit on the deck. Gus was in a great mood; he and his mom were chuckling and playing in the light of the fire. A while later the waiter reappeared to inform us that the full menu was in fact available to us if we chose to eat on the hearth of the fire pit.

In other words, while the sun was bleeding into stunning reds and pinks over the harbor, and all of the people were lining up like cattle at the front ramp in a rush to get seated inside, Bixie, Gus and I had a private table at the fire pit on the middle of the deck.

Let me explain it another way: there is no other seat in the house that I would have picked for a Valentine’s day dinner with my family, and we got it precisely because we hadn’t planned in advance.

Our spirits were warm, my friends. The drinks were delicious and the food was top drawer, and the ambiance was the stuff of dreams – a crackling fire under a blazing San Diego sky.

My wife and I didn’t exchange cards this year for the first time ever. But somehow that didn’t seem to matter.

And I can’t speak for her, but when I took in everything that was going on that night – the view, the warmth, our smiling baby and my gorgeous bride laughing hearthside – what else was there to say?

Every kind thought and warm feeling I have about my family was more radiant and somehow truer that night in Sandy Eggo.

And there’s not a Valentine’s Day Card on the planet that stacks up.