Two kinds of anniversary get ordered in this city, and they want almost opposite things. The first belongs to couples who married here recently — often at the Air Force One Pavilion at the Reagan Library on Presidential Drive, where the ceremony happens beneath the aircraft and the reception looks out over the whole valley, or at Hummingbird Nest Ranch on Kuehner Drive with its arenas and stone buildings against the hills, or at Wood Ranch Golf Club on the southwest edge. For them the anniversary is a date night with a restaurant reservation and, increasingly, a hotel night away. The second belongs to couples who have been married thirty-five, forty, fifty years and have spent most of them in the same house. Simi Valley's housing stock went up overwhelmingly between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, and the valley kept the people who bought it: the fiftieth-anniversary delivery here very often goes to the same front door as the wedding-present delivery did. That second case is the harder logistical problem, and this page spends most of its time on it.
The problem is simple to state and easy to get wrong: you cannot surprise two people who are both at home all day. A retired couple in a single-storey tract house hears the truck, sees the truck, and answers the door together. Three workarounds actually function here. Send it to a neighbour first — this is a valley of long-tenancy streets where the people two doors down have known the couple for decades and will happily hold a vase for an hour. Book the morning slot and ask for a time when you know one of them is out: a standing appointment, a round at the golf club, the Sunday service, the walk up Mount McCoy or along the Arroyo Simi path. Or take the honest route, deliver it to the restaurant or the hotel they are going to that night, and let the surprise land in front of an audience. Whichever you choose, put the mobile number of the person who is not being surprised in the notes.
Where couples go, because the evening usually involves a drive. In town there is the Grand Vista on Enchanted Way and the Posada Royale on Madera Road, both of which take deliveries at the desk with a reservation name. Over the ridge, well inside our eighteen-mile radius, sit the rooms Simi Valley couples use for a night away: the Four Seasons on Dole Drive and the Hyatt Regency on Westlake Boulevard in Westlake Village, the Westlake Village Inn and the Sheraton on Agoura Road, and the Warner Center hotels on Oxnard Street and Canoga Avenue in Woodland Hills. Dinner tends to be along First Street and the Simi Valley Town Center end of town, or out at the Westlake and Calabasas restaurant rows, or — for the couples who treat the drive as part of the evening — over Kanan Road toward the coast. One of our benches, Asunshine Florist, sits at 5909 Kanan Rd. in Agoura Hills at the top of that very road, which is a geographic convenience rather than any kind of arrangement: it simply means a delivery at that end of the radius is a short run.