Part of our resolutions for 2013 was to plan one date night a month. We had gotten into a bad habit of just hanging out around the house and watching movies in our free time, instead of planning more adventurous outings. This weekend was our January date night, which I was responsible for planning.
I thought it would be appropriate to plan seasonal date nights. Since it’s so cold out, the only thing that seemed fitting was ice skating (props to our friend Sarah for the idea). So I started hunting for an ice skating rink in DC. Little did I know that we had 3 in a 15 mile radius of our apartment (I mean we’ve only lived here for 3 years). Two of the rinks were in DC proper (National Gallery Museum and Navy Yard), which was a no-go for me. We do enough traveling on the metro during the week that we tried to avoid it at all costs on the weekend (who wants to waste 20 minutes waiting for a train). The last ice rink was in Pentagon City, which is in perfect driving distance and it has street parking.
With our location settled, we headed out this Sunday for a few laps around the rink. When we arrived, the ice rink was slammed (which we should have predicted—Sunday before a federal holiday and beautiful weather equals throngs of children) but after circling around the rink a few times we were able to find street parking (which was free because it was Sunday).
After parking the car, we rented our skates and headed into the rink area. It was $11/person to rent the skates for the day and the locker rental for our shoes was free.
We happened to get to the rink right as they were ushering people off the ice so they could refresh it with a Zamboni. I’ve been ice skating a few times but I’ve never gotten to see one of these in action.
The kids were all pretty mesmerized. And it gave me a chance to test out my brand new camera. I upgraded to a Canon Rebel T3i recently and this was the first chance I got to actually use it. I may have taken an exorbitant amount of pictures, but mostly because I have no idea what I’m doing so I just shoot at random. I would show you the pictures I took but I somehow manage to delete all of them when I transferred them to my computer…told you I have no idea what I’m doing. So sadly all I have are my iphone pictures.
The cool part about this rink is that it’s outdoors and it’s surrounded by restaurants and stores. We saw a bunch of parents dropping off their kids, while they went to shop. So note to all of you DC parents out there.
After a few minutes, the Zamboni was put away and we finally got an opportunity to skate our hearts out (aka try not to kill ourselves). I was perhaps a little overconfident in my skills before I actually made it on to the ice. Mr. A several times tried to convince me not to take my new camera onto the ice. I, being blindly overconfident in myself, told him that I would be fine and that skating wasn’t that hard.
Then, I took my first step on the ice and immediately remembered just how terrify it is, forcing me to finally admit that I was wrong and to run frantically to tuck the camera safely away in our locker. I guess sometimes boys can be the more responsible sex…who knew.
It took a few laps for us to get our sea ice legs. Even though we grew increasingly confident in our skills, we didn’t stop holding hands the entire time. Despite our mutual fear of eating ice, we both had a really great time zipping around and trying to avoid all the children. We even managed to work up quite a sweat on the ice—probably the whole dodging to avoid children part. Even with all the zigging and sagging, we didn’t fall once, although I came pretty close a few times.
It was nice just to be able to relax and forget the world for a few hours. I don’t think either one of us stopped laughing or smiling.
When the Zamboni came out again to clear the ice, we decided to call it a day—two hours of skating is quite enough for these old folks. Despite the sweat, we both agreed that it was the perfect date night idea (even if it was during the day). Maybe, we’ll even make it an annual thing. Consider date night #1 2013 a success!
Have you gone ice skating this year?
Anyone else accidentally delete a ton of pictures from their camera? Let’s all commiserate. I may or may not have shed a tear.
