The younger half of the volume has a different geography, and that geography is a causeway. Melbourne's evening life is split by the Indian River Lagoon: the restaurants and the hotels people book for an anniversary are on two different shores, and the flowers are almost never going to the same address as the dinner. Downtown, the New Haven Avenue restaurant row runs past Meg O'Malley's and the block of dining rooms around it, with Hotel Melby a few streets over on East Strawbridge Avenue — a Tapestry Collection property and the only genuine boutique hotel in the historic core. In Eau Gallie, Squid Lips sits out over the water near Ballard Park, and the Rossetter House Museum and Gardens on Highland Avenue anchors the arts district's event side. Across the water, Djon's Steak & Lobster House on Ocean Avenue in Melbourne Beach has been the county's occasion restaurant for decades. And on the oceanfront in Indialantic, the Crowne Plaza Melbourne Oceanfront and the beachfront hotel row along A1A carry the overnight side of the celebration. The useful rule: send the flowers to wherever the couple is sleeping, not to wherever they are eating.
Hotels on this coast want handling that a convention city would not require. The Hilton Melbourne Rialto Place by Melbourne Orlando International Airport is Brevard's conference property with a proper front-desk operation behind it, so putting an arrangement inside a room ahead of check-in is routine provided we have the booking name and the day of arrival. The oceanfront houses in Indialantic and Melbourne Beach are staffed more thinly, and a bouquet handed over at reception there can genuinely wait on the counter until somebody remembers to ring upstairs — so spell out which you want, inside the room or held below, and use the surname the booking was made under rather than the name on the card. The Crane Creek Inn, a small waterfront bed and breakfast on Crane Creek off the downtown grid, presents the reverse situation: no concierge, but a proprietor who will gladly arrange a placement if you telephone first. Inns of that size are the surest anniversary placements on this whole surface, for the unglamorous reason that somebody picks up.
One last thing worth saying plainly, because it decides more Melbourne anniversary deliveries than the flowers do: the address. Suntree and Viera are master-planned communities where several streets repeat similar names across neighboring subdivisions, and navigation apps route confidently to the wrong one. The barrier-island buildings in Indialantic, Indian Harbour Beach and Satellite Beach are mostly condominiums with locked lobbies, where the unit number is the whole delivery. And a fair number of Brevard households are seasonal, meaning the house that is occupied in February is empty in July. Give us the subdivision or building name, the unit, a mobile number with a request to call rather than ring, and a note if the recipients might be away — that is four lines, and it is the difference between an anniversary bouquet on the counter and an anniversary bouquet on a hot step.