We were away this weekend to the wilds of Western Maryland to celebrate nine years of marriage, which both of us find a little strange, I think. It's not that when we got married we didn't believe we'd still be together nine years later (otherwise, we wouldn't have gotten married), but that those nine years have gone by so quickly.

We wanted to get out of town for awhile (because we've gotten into a rut in DC of doing certain things and didn't want that to spoil the celebration, plus the constraints on doing a weekend away are less for us now) and initially thought of trying a resort spa until we looked at prices for something we just weren't sure we'd enjoy. (In particular, I wasn't sure I had the correct Mayflower ancestry required by the Greenbrier or, alternatively, enough new money.) The other option was to try out some of the winter sports as they come here in the Eastern U.S. We had been warned by our Colorado friends that skiing in the East is a pale shadow of what we got in the Rocky Mountains, but since I'm a translucent-grade skier (on the pale shadow index), that didn't seem so much of a hindrance. The other options, including snow tubing and snowshoeing sounded like something we'd enjoy as well.

We drove up to Deep Creek Lake on Saturday morning, following a fortuitous recent snowfall, and had lunch at the Deep Creek Brewing Company. J ordered the special soup of the day, "Vegetable," and was surprised that it was in actuality "Vegetable Beef." The waitress was apologetic and was able to get her a Portobello Mushroom sandwich instead. The Wisp ski resort is just a short distance away, so we checked it out, ostensibly to buy tickets for the night snow tubing. However, we discovered that tubing is much more kid-oriented than we expected, so rather than being the only adults hugging on to innertubes, I elected to do some night skiing while J read the newspaper and enjoyed the free folk concert at the lodge.

Everything I do these days is predicated by the thought that I might not be able to given my angina symptoms, but I was happy to discover that I could still downhill ski without having to stop too often. Most of the symptoms express themselves in moments of high adrenaline, so I simply stayed on the green and blue runs, which I would have in any case. While it was slightly colder, the advantage of nighttime skiing was that there was hardly any lines at the lifts and I filled up three and a half hours on the slopes rather than at the base. Wisp isn't going to threaten any Colorado resort with its options, but it was great for someone who hadn't been skiing in over six years. (I also found it amusing to see houses at the top of the slopes; one simply didn't see that in Colorado, likely because living at the top of a 14,000 foot peak makes it really difficult to cook and breath.)

We ate at the restaurant at Wisp itself that night, as it was 9pm by the time I turned in my rental equipment. The bar made me a decent Old Fashioned (the secret of which is still the fresh orange and cherries, along with a generous dashing of Angostura bitters) and Jill had a Smithwick's on tap. We had a pair of different pastas for dinner and I took advantage of not having to drive by having a second drink, a True Blu martini (Bombay Sapphire gin with hand-stuffed blue cheese olives).

We stayed at a very nice B&B, the Carmel Cove Inn, which was a little more than we'd normally spend for lodging, but we were treating ourselves for the anniversary. The room was quite cozy and the owner/operator, Dave, quite friendly, even though we showed up earlier than our arrival time. It was in a former monastery (or, as it went, I said, "So, this was a former monastery" and he responded, "No, it is a former monastery."), built in 1945 and operated as such for thirty years. Dave had pictures of the Carmelite brothers on the walls. Now the Chapel houses the billiards table and the complimentary wine and beer snack bar.

On Sunday we headed over to Swallow Falls State Park to see the waterfalls in the winter, as well as try and find a couple of geocaches that I wasn't surprised eluded us (it's much harder to find those with a couple of inches of snow on the ground).

Then we drove over to Herrington Manor State Park and did a half-day cross-country ski trail, a 2.6 mile trip through the woods. This was J's second time to cross-country ski, and my first, and we did fairly well at it for not knowing anything really about what makes good form other than watching the experts on the Winter olympics. Compared to downhill, cross-country is much more aerobic and I had to stop more often, although J said not as much as she thought I would. We finished the trail in under three hours and fell down less than ten times each (although I did bruise my ring finger, in a strange twist, in one of my more spectacular cruises into the forest off the trail).

Dinner that night was at the Four Seasons at the Will o' the Wisp. We wanted to go to a French restaurant in Oakland, but Garrett County observes Sundays as dry and so many restaurants don't even bother to open for the day. The Four Seasons reminded us of a place we went to in Richland, Washington called the Hanford House that was attached to the Red Lion hotel, complete with muzak and large glass windows overlooking nothing that was visible at night. When J asked about the vegetarian version of the pasta, the waitress indicated that it still might be made with a beef broth, so she instead asked for the portobello appetizer with a side of vegetables and rice which was easily accomplished. Unfortunately, when it arrived the mushroom hadn't even been cooked and was drowned in a sauce that uncomfortably simply resembled blue cheese salad dressing. I had the "light fare" of flounder simply prepared with olive oil, but the side of rice with banana peppers and blue cheese had nearly as much cheese as rice. It wasn't the worst food that we've ever had, but it was close.

Returning to the B&B, we enjoyed a couple of complementary glasses of red wine from Cygnus and watched Punch Drunk Love, a movie that I had avoided in the theaters even though it had one of my favorite actresses in it, Emily Watson, mainly because it had one of those actors I can't stand, Adam Sandler. While it did not change my opinion of Sandler, it was better than I expected and was nothing like I expected.

This morning we left Deep Creek Lake after clearing the four inches of snow from our car and immediately headed back to D.C., worried somewhat about the trip because of the forecast. The drive wasn't too bad, although it snowed all the way and got fairly ugly once we hit the I-270 corridor.

Since we got back so early, we thought we'd take advantage of half-price wine night at our favorite local restaurant, Chef Geoff's, and I made a reservation for 8:30. We had ordered a bottle of wine and put our food order in when the waitress returned about five minutes later, very apologetic, and explained that she wasn't going to be able to serve us any food because they had a small kitchen fire and the kitchen was being closed down for the night. A minute later, this was confirmed as ten fireman successively trudged through the restaurant on their way to the kitchen. (Strangely enough, this kind of thing has happened to us before: last year, we had just finished our first courses of tapas at Jaleo when the waiter told us that the kitchen was closed because of a water leak.) Since we hadn't received our wine yet, we simply left, returning home to open a bottle of red wine from Chateau St. Michelle from 1997, which we figured was close enough to our wedding date, and cooked a quick meal of risotto with brocolli and mushrooms.

And that's the difference between dating and being married for nine years--knowing that such things just make great stories later.