A Dinner To Remember…

a quick photo before our anniversary meal…

Remember when I mentioned that it’s a tradition that Ed and I eat Kentucky Fried Chicken on our anniversary every year?  We do this for a reason.

Forty years ago, we drove up to a KFC in our car, with Just Married painted all over it,  to buy our dinner.  When the store manager realized that we’d just gotten married (about 3 hours prior), he gave us our first meal as husband and wife– at no charge. We’ve been celebrating our anniversary with Colonel Sanders every since!

Well, this year, in a moment of weakness,  I actually spent our anniversary toying with the idea of breaking that tradition of spending our anniversary with “The Colonel”, but let me back up for just a moment.

Ed and I chose to go back to Amelia Island for our anniversary celebration this year.  This marked our fourth year in a row of going to this island to celebrate.  (We may have unintentionally started another tradition!)  We stayed at the same hotel as last year, and would you believe we even had the same room?  What are the odds of that happening?

On Amelia Island, there is a little ocean-side bar and grill called “The Sandy Bottoms”.  It’s literally located right on the beach.  They have a covered patio, or you can even dine under an umbrella with your feet in the sand, if you chose to.  They have live music each evening, and on Monday, which was our anniversary, their evening special was steak–and I love steak!

After learning about the steak special, I spent most of the afternoon trying to decide if I wanted to abandon our KFC tradition, and eat steak on the beach at “The Sandy Bottoms”.  Finally, I decided it just wouldn’t feel right NOT to eat KFC.  Some traditions are just too special to be broken.  Ed seemed to feel the same way.

Monday evening, around 7 o’clock, Ed and I packed up our beach chairs, changed our clothes, then headed for the local Kentucky Fried Chicken, where we’ve gotten our last three anniversary meals.  Our plan was to get our meal “to go”, then have a picnic on the beach.

So, I’m finally all excited about our beach picnic, and getting some KFC, when we enter the parking lot of the restaurant and see–an empty, abandoned building!  Sometime, during the past nine months, the island KFC had gone out of business!  Talk about bursting our bubble!!!  I racked my brain, then remembered our daughter saying they’d once gotten some KFC in Yulee, which is located about 13 miles inland.  Ed and I were really determined, so we  headed for Yulee, in search of Colonel Sanders!  We finally found the place, got our chicken, then headed back to the beach.  By this time, it was well after 8 o’clock in the evening.

We took our food to the little park area beside the beach, and put it on a table.  It was about this time when we discovered that the evening breeze blowing off the ocean had gotten a lot cooler than before…It was also about this time when we discovered that the girl at KFC had neglected to pack any eating utensils for us!  There is just no way to eat mashed potatoes or coleslaw without a fork or a spoon!

Fortunately, there is a convenience store located next-door to our hotel, so we made the decision to just pack our food up, stop by the store to buy some eating utensils,  and just eat in our room where it was warmer–and that’s what we did.  We had a “carpet picnic”, except we ate on the coffee table!  After the  ordeal of finding the food, it was so delicious–and that meal will definitely go down in the books as one of our most memorable anniversary dinners ever!