Small Life, Slow Life: Go on a Date…without your Phone!

C and I are both busy people and our phones are glued to our fingers. C does all his own scheduling, so he’s constantly hearing from clients. There’s also facebook, twitter, WordPress, Words with Friends, Draw Something…all these things keep me busy, and we were despairing a few weeks ago that we missed just having deep talks without the interruption of the phone.

So C had a great idea to go on a date this week…and leave our phones at home. I’ll admit that I liked the idea until it was actually time to do it.

“What if something happens to us?” I asked as he held out his hand for my phone.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, an accident or something? What if someone has an emergency?”
“We’ll be fine.”
“What if someone needs us?”
“They’ll have to wait.”

I eventually agreed and we got in the car. But where to go?

We decided we wanted to try somewhere completely brand new for coffee, so we started to drive through Topanga Canyon toward the beach.

We weren’t even in the car for ten minutes and I was already excited. Too often we get stuck in the familiar pattern of our days. Doing something new is really fun!

Between the San Fernando Valley and the beach, there’s an old-fashioned part of Topanga that really is like being in a different state.

It wasn’t too long until we found where we wanted to try coffee:

I couldn’t help but thinking that this song was a perfect soundtrack for our date:

We’ll have coffee and watch the strangers
Gather our letters and carry us further
Diluted and faded, still safely there
Still there, still there

So cute!

While we sipped our coffee, we thought we’d go ahead and share the berry cobbler. What’s a date without something a little sweet?

I tend to like to go all out for special occasions!

It felt a little awkward at first – just to talk without our phones with us! Isn’t that weird? When C made a trip to the bathroom, I mechanically reached toward my purse for my phone before realizing that it wasn’t there! But it was a very freeing experience. We got to talk about the week we’d had and stuff we were worried + excited about.

Pretty doily our cobbler arrived on.

C and I rarely ever eat sugar, so it was nice to indulge for once. Whoever thought of pairing ice cream with a warm dessert was a genius!

It was super yum!

After we paid the bill, we were having so much fun that we decided to extend the date. C and I both spent our teenage years playing tons and tons of video games, and decided we should make a trip to an old arcade he knew about. I get a strange thrill out of watching my man completely destroy skilled teenagers at Street Fighter. But I love video games too! I played Bubble Bobble, Frogger, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (my favorite game of the franchise), Pacman, and the list goes on!

C said he’d never been on a date at an arcade. It made me happy!

I saw this same pig in a canyon near Simi Valley earlier in the week, and remembered that there was also one in Topanga Canyon that I’d always wanted to take a picture of.

Like stepping back in time, isn’t it?

This arcade smelled the way all arcades can – like dank carpet and sweaty boys. There were bags of junk food and lots of kinds of soda for 50-cents. We don’t eat that stuff (plus we’d already had cobbler + caffeine) so we had a look around and decided what we wanted to play. We gathered all our quarters and had a lot of fun. Going to an arcade also makes for a very cheap date!

On the way there, we saw a most interesting church:

Hmm…you definitely don’t see that every day.

After a while of some button-mashing, we finished our evening with some protein-style burgers from everyone’s favorite SoCal burger joint:

I took a picture of C just as an employee quickly blurred past him:

And that’s it! We had so much fun, we definitely want to make phoneless dates a regular thing! We really had a chance to connect, talk and giggle. Plus it had a very special feeling, like we were making true time for each other.

Would you ever try a phoneless date? Where would you go?