Backpack, Backpack, Yeah!

So our anniversary was over the weekend, right? And we celebrated it as any normal couple has been married for eleventy hundred years would: with dinner and a movie (How To Train Your Dragon in 3D, which was fantastic). But before that, we went shopping for backpacks, because have I mentioned yet that we are going camping in (checks calendar) 75 days? No? Not yet?

I will start out with this not-at-all-surprising revelation: I kind of can't wait for this camping trip to be over so I can start obsessing about my next vacation, whatever and wherever that will be. There is something slightly more sane about agonizing over the details of a journey to the tropics, as opposed to plotting a trek into the woods where we will eat hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks.

Also, there is less to pack when you're going to be wearing nothing but sarongs and flip-flops for a week.

But anyway. One of the things on my Endless List Of Stuff To Do Before We Go To The 1000 Islands -- after "cause a furor over passports" and "buy an air mattress" -- was to get Shae a new backpack. She has one already, a cute little Dante Beatrix penguin number that I won in an Internet contest about a year and a half ago, but it's getting to be too small, since Shae is like three hundred feet tall already. I did some internet research and found a bag at L.L. Bean that I liked.

Long story short, there is an L.L. Bean store -- an actual brick-and-mortar store -- in a fancy shopping center near our house, so we went to check it out. We wended up getting a different backpack than the one we originally picked out, but Shae loves the one we got, which is what really matters. (Please note that I did not know about the whistle in the sternum strap until after the bag was home and already being loved, even if it does not yet contain a singing map.)

We had a good time, too, because there were live "attack" fish in a big ol' tank:

And also a tricycle, which we rode around on for like half an hour:

So it turns out our anniversary actually WAS fun for the whole family.