Our Valentine's Day Adventure

We celebrated Valentine's Day yesterday, because today we'd be busy with church and Sunday school and such.  So we drove up into the Shenandoah Valley and visited our favorite little restaurant-and-gift-shop, The Apple House, for lunch.  They serve the most amazing apple butter doughnuts -- made from the same recipe they used in the 1960s when they first opened.  It's a family-owned-and-operated place, with lots of other yummy food besides the doughnuts, including the best barbecue I've had north of North Carolina.  Also, the best bacon I've ever had anywhere.  The kids usually want breakfasty stuff involving pancakes there, so we got them that.  I tried their tomato-basil soup for the first time yesterday, and like everything else we've ever had there, it was delicious.

And they have a gift shop with quirky, wacky (and sometimes a little off-color) stuff for sale, like signs and t-shirts.  They have different stuff every time we go there, and yesterday I took pictures of a bunch of the signs I liked best:

I was really tempted to buy that last one.  But I bought a sign last time we were up there a couple months ago, one that says "I should have been a cowboy."  It's in my living room now, because "cowboy" was my dream job when I was little.

They sell lots of yummy food items in their gift shop too, some of which you can see in the above photos.  We came home with only two things yesterday (besides doughnuts for breakfast):  a bottle of hickory syrup (which we've had before -- so amazing!) and a jar of "traffic jam," which we bought because here in northern VA, we have a lot of traffic, so the name made us laugh.  Here's a shot of all of them beside the flowers Cowboy gave me for Valentine's Day:

Yellow roses are my favorite, and have been ever since I was a teen, thanks to the movie Indiscreet (1958) and the Bobby Darin song "18 Yellow Roses."  Cowboy gave me 18 of them the day he proposed, we had them at our wedding, and he gets them for me on special occasions when he can find them :-)

So anyway, that was our day-early celebration of Valentine's Day.  Not sappy-romantic, just lots of fun, which is how I like it!