Where the surprise physically happens is a house, in most cases, and Evansville's houses have quirks worth knowing before you pick a time. Kratzville and North Park on the north side are the fastest addresses in the city, being minutes from both benches. The older streets — Jacobsville, Lamasco, Goosetown, Tepe Park, Howell on the West Side — are narrow-lot houses, frequently with no porch and an outward-opening storm door, so there is nowhere sheltered to set anything down. Bayard Park, the Washington Avenue historic blocks and Haynie's Corner have real porches and steps a driver can use. The East Side streets off Vann, Boeke and Green River Road, and out into Lincolnshire, are mid-century and mostly built around a garage that is the door people actually use — so the front bell rings into an empty hallway while someone is thirty feet away. McCutchanville and Darmstadt have long drives with the mailbox at the road. The apartment complexes along Green River Road and the Lloyd need a building number and a unit, and a leasing office that closes at five. One more local note on discretion: in a three-shop market, the person who answers the phone may well know both of you. Put your own mobile number on the order as the contact rather than the recipient's if the surprise genuinely matters, and remember it is the card, not the delivery, that gives things away early.
For the evenings themselves, the romance geography here is compact and genuinely pretty. Downtown, the riverfront esplanade at Dress Plaza runs along the top of the levee past the Four Freedoms Monument and the Pagoda, with the LST 325 moored at the bank and Kentucky on the far side of the water — it is the one view in this city that people bring visitors to see. Just below it, the Riverside historic blocks and the Reitz Home on First Street are nineteenth-century river houses on quiet streets. The Ford Center and the Victory Theatre put a concert or a game inside a few blocks of all of it, and Le Merigot at Bally's Evansville on Riverside Drive is the hotel in the middle. Further out: Wesselman Woods on the East Side is old forest inside the city limits, Mesker Park Zoo and Botanic Garden sits on the west side, Angel Mounds is southeast along the river, and Newburgh's Water Street river blocks are ten minutes east. The proper getaway is New Harmony, twenty-five miles northwest in Posey County, with the Roofless Church and the labyrinth — inside our radius, and the place people from this corner drive to specifically to be somewhere quiet. Practical advice on proposals: do not have flowers delivered to a proposal site. Carry them. Have the arrangement sent to a hotel room with the reservation surname and the check-in time, or to the house for afterward, and keep the outdoor part of the evening in your own hands.