Anniversary flowers in Dubuque

For the couples who go out, the geography is compact and genuinely good. Hotel Julien Dubuque at 200 Main Street is the anniversary hotel in this city by a distance — a downtown landmark with a long and slightly disreputable history, a restaurant and a lounge off the lobby, and a front desk that handles arrival deliveries as routine. At the Port of Dubuque, the Grand Harbor Resort and the Hilton Garden Inn sit beside the Ice Harbor and the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium, which makes them the choice for the anniversaries that include grandchildren. Up on the bluff the choice narrows to restored mansions of six or eight rooms with the owner working the desk — the Redstone Inn on Bluff Street, the Hancock House on Grove Terrace, the Richards House on Locust. Couples book these for a twentieth or a fortieth precisely because they had the first night there, and a host with eight rooms will set an arrangement on the dresser before the key changes hands; what the order needs is the night, not the day you placed it. The other long-standing habit is a weekend in Galena, Illinois — sixteen miles east on US 20 over the Julien Dubuque Bridge, and a good part of why the radius on this market is drawn at 60 miles instead of the usual twenty-five. The DeSoto House Hotel has taken guests on Galena's Main Street since 1855, with a balcony Lincoln spoke from and a building Grant later ran a presidential campaign out of; Eagle Ridge Resort sits on the lakes in the Galena Territory; Chestnut Mountain is on the Illinois bluff downriver.

Then there is the large share of this market that is not in the city at all, and it is the part most out-of-town orders get wrong. Plenty of these couples farm, or retired off a farm and kept the acreage: Farley, Epworth, Cascade, Peosta, New Vienna, Bernard, St. Donatus, Bellevue, Maquoketa, Dyersville, and the ridge roads running north above Sherrill and Balltown along the Great River Road. Two things belong on a rural order that a city order does not need. A landmark — the color of the barn, the crossroad, the name painted on the mailbox — because the drive can run a quarter mile back off the county road behind a windbreak and the number is not always posted. And a time of day, because through planting and harvest nobody is in the house between dawn and dark, and an arrangement standing in an unheated entryway loses a week of its life. Note too that the anniversary itself is usually observed on the nearest Sunday out here — dinner at the house after Mass, the family driving in — so the delivery that actually works is a Saturday one.

Milestone anniversaries here frequently run through a church and a care community rather than a hotel, and that is worth planning for. A twenty-fifth or a fiftieth in this city is often marked at Mass with the family in the pew — at the Cathedral of St. Raphael on Bluff Street, at a west-end parish, or back at a county church in Farley, Epworth, Cascade or Dyersville — and then at a hall lunch afterwards. Flowers for that day go to the house in the morning, not to the church, unless the family has arranged something with the parish. The harder and more common version: one of the couple is now in a care wing and the other is driving over every afternoon. The Stonehill campus on Windsor Avenue, Luther Manor on Hillcrest Road and Bethany Home on Lincoln Avenue all take deliveries at a front desk and will walk an arrangement to a room, and the right build for that room is low, light, unscented and in a container a resident can lift with one hand. Couples who married in this city also come back to the places they married — the Grand River Center at the Port, Steeple Square in the former St. Mary's church at Fifteenth and White, the Grand Opera House on Eighth Street, the Dubuque Arboretum on Arboretum Drive — and a photograph on the same steps thirty years on is a better anniversary than a restaurant is.