Let Them Eat Cake (and free ice cream and free dinner and free pastries)

I don't know if people are taking my last post too seriously or what but last weekend Tiffany and I got lots of free stuff.

On Friday night, we drove up to Calistoga to celebrate our seventh anniversary. I had been anticipating heavy traffic over the Golden Gate Bridge, but there was none. An empty roadway does not count as free stuff, but perhaps it should--it feels just as good. We hardly even had time to enjoy the road picnic Tiffany packed us (chicken salad and crackers, icy-cold Coke and a lemon-flavored LaCroix).

Once we got to our hotel, we waited for the bar to clear at a nearby restaurant and ordered a few appetizers. We sat there for two hours, enjoying our food and visiting with a couple of gentlemen to our right. When it came time for dessert, we debated between the homemade ice cream and the chocolate cake.

"Cake," I said, finally.

Maybe the waiter noticed it was hard for me to turn the other option down because he brought us a scoop of each flavor of ice cream with our cake. It was like $12 worth of dairy goodness.

"On the house," he said.

I raised my eyebrows at Tiffany in a "best-weekend-ever" sort of way.

We got up to pay just before midnight only to find that the gentlemen to our right had paid for our meal (yes, they knew we were gay).

But our good fortune didn't stop there.

The next night, when I asked our waitress to put the last cheddar biscuit from our order of the savory pastries into a to-go box, she brought six fresh ones to the table instead because "one just looked so lonely." Plus a free cookie, even though we'd said we were too full for dessert. I tottered out of the restaurant with my biscuits held high.

"People must really like us!" I said.

"Shhh, you're embarrassing me," Tiffany whispered.

I ignored her. Another thought had occurred to me.

"Either they really like us," I said. "Or they think we're poor and starving."