It feels like it’s been forever since Whit and I went on a legitimate, nice date. Usually when we want to spend time together we’ll veg in front of the TV with Domino’s, go out to Buffalo Wild Wings (his favorite) or On the Border (my favorite), or play Super Mario Brothers Wii together. We did go to Longwood Gardens for our anniversary, but we don’t regularly go out and we rarely ever spend money on a meal at a nice restaurant.

For Valentine’s Day we wanted to fix that. In New York City it was looking unlikely that we would be able to go to this gluten-free bakery that I was longing to go to, and Whit and I both wished for more time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After finding a bakery with gf donuts in Philadelphia, and learning that a lot of the pieces we liked at the MET had counterparts at the Philly Art Museum, we decided to go into the city “one of these days.”

Thanks to my hubby, we made it happen on Sunday to celebrate Valentine’s Day. (Whit was sick the week prior, so we weren’t able to get reservations at the restaurant we wanted to go to on Saturday. It was actually nice because we got to spend time with our friends from out of town on Saturday for lunch, meet their four-month-old baby (who is a DOLL), and have a quiet evening at home playing Dominion in front of the fireplace.)

After church on Sunday, and eating a quick meal at home, we headed into the city and made our way to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The building itself is stunning – it is enormous, old with beautiful architecture, and somehow the art is integrated into the building. It’s quite impressive. We divvied up our three hours there into equal time spent at the armory (the second largest collection of armor in the US), Impressionist art from the 1850s-1900s, and modern art (which disgusts me, for the most part) + ancient Asian art (which is mostly architecture integrated into each room).

We had an hour and a half between the museum closing and our dinner reservations, which we thought we would have to kill time during, but it took so long to find parking that we ended up just walking straight to dinner. We got there about fifteen minutes early, after nearly freezing (it was 0 degrees outside with a wind chill of -19!!), and they went ahead and seated us.

We ate at Giorgio’s on Pine, which is an authentic Italian restaurant, with small tables close together and the Italian waiters squeezing by, that boasts a practically entire gluten-free menu! I was IN HEAVEN! It’s one thing to get gluten-free baked goods (by the way, it closed early so we decided to go another time), but to be able to choose any type of Italian food?? My heart was – let’s just say, content. And let’s just say I ate all of the bread that they brought out. :O

It was a really fun night, and we decided that we can sacrifice two medium meals out to eat at a place like Giorgio’s again, no problem. So hopefully we will have more fun date nights in the city, just not when it’s so cold!