Anniversary flowers in Columbus

The room-delivery map is short and manageable. The Hotel Indigo Columbus Architectural Center is the downtown option, walking distance to the library plaza, the courthouse square and the restaurants, and its rooms lean into the town's landmark buildings as a theme — which makes it the natural base for an architecture anniversary. The rest of the lodging sits west of the river along Jonathan Moore Pike, which is what State Road 46 is called through Columbus, in the chain-hotel cluster near the I-65 interchange; that cluster is convenient to the interstate and about ten minutes from downtown. A hotel delivery works the same way everywhere here: give the shop the guest's full name exactly as the reservation reads, the arrival date, and a mobile number. A front desk will hold an arrangement for a guest who has not checked in, but it will not hold it for a name it cannot find in the system, and in a small property there is no concierge desk absorbing the confusion on your behalf. If you want the flowers in the room rather than at the desk, say so on the order and expect the property to need the guest's permission first.

Anniversary dinners in Columbus concentrate downtown in a walkable few blocks, which makes a table delivery unusually easy to coordinate compared with a big city. Smith's Row on Fourth Street is the long-standing choice for the formal version of the evening. Henry Social Club on Washington Street handles the smaller, more current one. Upland's Columbus Pump House sits on the riverfront in the old pump house building, and Zaharakos, the Washington Street soda fountain with its mechanical orchestrion and marble counters, is where a couple who have been together forty years often had their first date, which makes it a better anniversary destination than its ice-cream menu suggests. If you want flowers waiting at a table, call the restaurant first, then order for delivery earlier in the day with the reservation name and time on the order — almost no restaurant in a city this size wants a driver arriving mid-service, and most will happily take the arrangement in the afternoon and set it out before you arrive. The same applies to a milestone open house, which in Columbus is more often held in a church hall, a community room or Ceraland Park than in a rented ballroom.

Then there is the getaway that Columbus couples take rather than receive. Fifteen miles west on State Road 46 is Nashville, Indiana and Brown County State Park — the artist-colony town, Abe Martin Lodge inside the park, the Brown County Playhouse, and the historic inn at Story a little further south. It is the default southern Indiana anniversary weekend and it is comfortably inside the widened 60-mile radius, as are Bloomington further west, Batesville to the east, and the Edinburgh and Franklin side of I-65 to the north. Closer to home, the anniversary landmarks are Mill Race Park, where the Driftwood and Flatrock rivers join to form the East Fork White River under the park's tall observation tower, the terraced Irwin Gardens downtown, and Otter Creek Golf Course, the Robert Trent Jones-designed course on the county's north side. Deliveries to a park, a garden or a clubhouse need a person and a time rather than an address — send to the house or the hotel and carry the flowers to the view, which works better anyway.