An anniversary in Bridgeville generally begins with a drive, and the drive is part of the evening. Head northeast and you are in the queue for the Fort Pitt Tunnel, which produces the one reliable piece of theatre in this region: you go in under a hill with nothing to look at, and you come out with the whole city assembled in the windshield in a single frame — rivers, bridges, the wedge of Downtown at the Point. Couples from this valley have been using that reveal to start an evening for sixty years and it has not worn out. Head the other way, up over the ridge, and dinner is on Washington Road through Mt. Lebanon or further south around McMurray and Peters Township; head down I-79 and it is Canonsburg and the Southpointe restaurants. All of which is useful to know for one practical reason: in almost every version of that evening, the flowers should be at the house before the car leaves, not waiting at the far end. Restaurants in this market are mostly small rooms with no cooler, no back-of-house shelf to spare and a hostess stand that is already busy at seven, and a bouquet that has to be carried through a dinner, propped in a footwell and walked back into the kitchen at eleven has had a worse night than either of you. Send it to the table you own. An afternoon delivery means the arrangement is standing there while somebody is still deciding what to wear, which is the moment it does the most work anyway.
If the anniversary involves a night in town rather than a dinner, the delivery changes shape and gets easier. The Downtown hotels sit within a few blocks of each other — the Omni William Penn on William Penn Place, the Kimpton Hotel Monaco a block along the same street, the Fairmont Pittsburgh on Market Street, the Wyndham Grand down at the Point, the Renaissance on Sixth Street — with The Oaklander over in Oakland and the Priory on the North Side if you want something smaller. Out along the Parkway West there is the airport hotel cluster past Coraopolis, and down I-79 the Southpointe hotels at Canonsburg. What a hotel delivery needs is different from what a house delivery needs: the reservation name exactly as it was booked, the check-in date, and a phone number, because the room number does not exist yet when you place the order. Flowers arriving before check-in are held at the bell desk and handed over at the counter, which is completely normal and works well; if you want the arrangement waiting inside the room instead, that is a conversation with the hotel rather than with us, and some properties will do it and some will not. Ask them, then tell us which it is. One local wrinkle: if the plan is dinner in town and a room afterward, the better order is flowers to the house in the afternoon and the hotel left out of it entirely — nobody wants to check in carrying a vase.
The milestone anniversaries in this valley tend to be celebrated where the couple actually is, which is often the same house they have lived in for decades or a residence a few miles up the hill. For a 40th, 50th or 60th at home, the only thing that really needs planning is who opens the door: a couple in their eighties may not hear a bell over a television, so a mobile number for a son or daughter beats a doorbell, and an afternoon window beats a surprise at nine in the morning. For a delivery into senior living or skilled care — Asbury Heights, up Bower Hill Road in Mt. Lebanon; Providence Point, over in Scott Township; and the county's Kane Community Living Center, also in Scott — the arrangement goes to a front desk with the resident's full name and a room or unit number, and it should be small enough for a bedside table that already has a lamp and a phone on it, not a windowsill piece somebody has to relocate. Where the anniversary is a party rather than a dinner, the rooms it happens in around here are fire-hall social rooms, church halls and club dining rooms out toward Upper St. Clair, Peters Township and Canonsburg; for any of those, order the delivery for the afternoon before the room opens and give us the name and mobile number of whoever will be there setting up, because a locked hall at four o'clock is the most common way a party flower order goes wrong. If you need several matching low centrepieces rather than one arrangement, say so in the notes and the shop will quote it — that is per-event work rather than a catalogue item.