“X Marks the Spot” – but first you need to plant the “X”

The Date Idea: Hire a metal detector and comb the beach looking for hidden treasure.

THE IMPORTANT BIT: Plant your own treasure! Stupidly I didn’t realise the potential of this date idea, I think it’s often a short coming many have when taking out a date. Had I taken more thought with this date and buried treasure for Emma to find, it would have produced an amazing surprise! It’s quite a thrill to discover something cool.

The Con’s: Any more than 10 minutes of searching in the sand is boring if you don’t find anything. But once you’ve found something, and it doesn’t matter what it is, you may not want to stop!

The Pro’s: When you find something, it’s exhilarating, it’s infectious!

How to make your date fall in love
with this date idea!

When Burying Treasure For Girls:
- If you’re not sure what your partner will like, buy cheap accessories, like ear rings, rings, belts or bracelets / bangles.
- If the accessories have no metal components bury bottle caps with the treasure for the metal detector to pick up.

When Burying Treasure For Guys:
- Money Clips are cheap to find on ebay, or you can get creative and bury a 6 pack of beer, or something funny that’ll make him laugh or impress!

It’s easy to bury anything really, even delicate things that are packaged up in a box, even zip locked in an airtight plastic bag to avoid the sand and moisture. Make sure you add metal to the packaging so the detector can pick it up.

Decoys:
Use decoys to keep your date interested, and have want to search for more:
- Bottle Tops
- Coins

How To Hide Your Treasure So You Can Find It Later:
Plot out a section of beach. In the summer months I recommend areas of beach that are not too busy. If you’re hiding valuables, do so during the winter months as beaches are rarely used, and ensure that you bury your treasure at least 5 – 8 inches below the sand.

Bury treasure the morning of or the night before you take your date out.

Begin with a reference point, a landmark… maybe a sign post or bin nearby that will help you locate the area of beach when you return the following day.

Bury your main treasure first, make sure it’s not too close to the shore line as wet sand may give you a false reading, and you don’t want the tide to come wash your treasure away (if you haven’t buried it deep enough). Also the tide may wet your treasure.

Scatter a couple of coins 3 to 5 metres away (about 7-10 feet) from your treasure. I’d scatter them towards your marker. Only use 2 coins, you don’t want your partner finding coins all day.

Again, another 3 – 5 metres away, scatter some bottle caps even closer to your marker, so it’s easy to find these items as soon as you step onto the beach.

This will help you understand and locate the main treasure much easier. And will make it much more fun as your partner starts finding more valuable things as they move closer towards your buried treasure.

About the Metal Detectors:
I hired the metal detector from Aaron Zanussi at Metal Detector Hire Melbourne located in Melbourne, Australia. Aaron was awesome to deal with – he gave me lots of info about what to expect on the beach…Aaron mentioned that people usually hit the beaches in the summer months looking for lost rings and valuables, so in the winter time it’s rare to find anything fun – and in most cases bottle caps will be found, all true. Aaron thoroughly explained how to use the metal detector, it’s easy, a trained monkey can do it.

Aaron’s hire out of the metal detector will break the $30 Date Night budget. It’s $40, with a $100 deposit which is reasonable. I highly recommend this date idea; but only if you take time to bury treasure. You know your date will be thrilled when they find something. You’ll have a blast!

In USA we eat! Up to the letter U in our ABC date night challenge…

The concept of the “Great American Diner” is a novelty to Australia. I never knew it existed until Emma mentioned it, an all American diner in our very own backyard of Melbourne. Excited, I was dying to find out if the American Diner would cut the mustard amongst Melbournian pallets.

Misty’s diner has everything health fanatics tell you NOT eat – and it’s served up the way you’d expect in USA – LARGE! At 32 years of age I tried root beer for the first time – ever! It’s an odd taste and quite difficult to explain. Best described, it was like drinking deep heat, or goanna oil. You know the ointment used to reduce muscle inflammation. There was no burning sensation but rather this medicinal flavour undertones in-between a massive hits of sweetness. And I mean a TRUCK LOAD of cane sugar! YEEEEAAH – sugar high!!!

There’s so much to love about this place, it’s loud, and it’s very pink and stereotypically American with juke boxes, finned cars and Misty donning a Lady BOSS shirt. The diner is nestled within a Car Wash. The place is packed all the time and I’m told you can’t book a table. We were lucky enough to walk right in and get a table – usually you’ll wait in line.

The highlight was most definitely the shakes. Reeces Pieces Shake – OMG! It’s full of artery clogging goodness. For the Aussies that have never had Reeces Pieces – its peanut butter in a chocolate tart-like shell, which is added to… well, a shake! The shake alone is reason enough to make it out to Misty’s Diner.

Misty’s Diner has my tick of approval for a strictly one time only experience to try something different. Now that I’ve done it, I doubt I’ll make it back – it’s not the kind of place you’d go for a source of nutrition. I may make an exception for a craving of a reeces pieces shake once or twice a year.

Want to try out Misty’s Diner & Car Wash for yourself?
103 – 105 High Street, Prahran. Melbourne, Australia.

Enjoy!

Den.

Pack a Picnic
A classic! Take a fully-stocked picnic basket to a patch of green near you and while away a beautiful afternoon together in the grass. Soft cheeses, fresh fruits, maybe the weekend papers. It’s a beautiful way to spend the day together and get back to nature all at once. Not to mention, it’s relaxing – which is a nice change from a week full of deadlines and emails, no?

Play Pool in a Pub
Find a seedy pub with a good pool table and cold beer. Take a pocketful of change and spend the night challenging each other to a few rounds on the felt. To make it really interesting, place some stakes on game outcomes. Loser stacks the dishwasher for a week, for example.

Public Event
No doubt your city puts on stacks of public events throughout the year! Find out what’s coming up and head along – there’ll be street stalls, great food, things to do, things to learn about, a parade to watch… best of it, it’s free entry!

Playground
Find a playground and go play! Be big kids again. Chase each other around, throw water bombs, swing on the swings and get nauseous on the round-a-bouts. Anything that reminds you of childhood games is good. Wrap this date up with an ice cream.

Pampering
Spend a night pampering each other at your very own at-home day spa. You could give your partner a facial, a manicure, a foot rub, a massage…. The possibilities are endless. Pop on some relaxing music, light a few candles and some incense and get to it. Google is great if you want instructions on how to perform any treatments. Popping to the drugstore beforehand for supplies like body scrubs or bath bombs is a good idea.

Well, I knew it involved co-ordinates and maps and things like that… and I have vague memories of a compass and a girl guide uniform in my childhood… But we did do some orienteering of our own this week for our O date idea and we had a blast – Geocaching is the specific name of the company who has engineered something to the effect of a worldwide treasure hunt!

More about Geocaching Date Night here.

Outdoor Cinemas
A summer’s night, a picnic basket, a bottle of wine and a great movie on the big screen with a pin-pricked backdrop of a starry sky… well, it just positively smacks of romance, doesn’t it?

Many outdoor cinemas are free, but even if you do have to fork out for tickets, it’s totally worth it. Pick a romantic or a scary movie for an excuse to snuggle closer.

Op-shopping
You can make your op-shop date night as fun or as serious as you want to. Assuming you’re the serious type, it’s simply a matter of finding some of your city’s best vintage stores and hunting for bargains. You’ll score a whole new outfit – each – for your $30 budget.

If you’re not the vintage-fashion type, then this date becomes a matter of public humiliation.

Go op-shopping together and pick out the most ghastly (probably 80s) outfits you can for each other, then plan to go for lunch or coffee afterwards… wearing the outfits chosen for you by your partner.

Take lots of pictures… and send them to us, we want to see them! What a hoot.

If you’ve never tried your hand at Vintage shopping before but have always wanted to, see if anyone enterprising in your community is running Op-Shop tours.

We can highly recommend Melbourne Op-Shop Tours, who are an on-foot-and-public-transport tour which is casual and relaxed (as opposed to shuffling you on and off huge buses all day) and while you shop they’ll give you great pointers on bagging great vintage finds. (NB: If you’re going on one of these tours, it’s going to cost more than $30 for the date night… but every now and then it’s good to splurge!)

Open Plains Zoo
It’s like a mini-African safari right in your own stomping ground and a great way to see animals out of their (normal) cages, roaming around larger open spaces. Enjoy a day there together taking lots of happy snaps.

Opera
I’m willing to bet most people haven’t seen a proper Opera before. And that’s great because at a minimum, the point of date night is to do something new. Grab you and your date tickets for a brand new experience. Same-day ticket agencies are your key to keeping this date night cheap.

Kikki-k’s Love Conversation Starters

Live Music
Find a cosy little jazz club, or nab tickets to a concert you know you’ll both love. Nothing like bopping the night away to great live tunes. Have a dance (if appropriate!)

Laksa
Coconut-y, delicious dish that deserves to be a date night all of it’s own. Find a great Laksa place near you and take your sweetie there for dinner.

Lattes
Find a fantastic coffee shop and spend a cold afternoon indoors with the weekend papers, a couple of good magazines and each others’ company. $30 should cover a few coffees as well as lunch or afternoon tea.

Lesson
Something you’ve always wanted to learn how to do? Sign yourselves up and go along… perhaps a cooking lesson, a surfing lesson, a wine tasting lesson… If you’re both Francophiles or perhaps planning a trip to Europe, sign yourselves up to a whole course of lessons and make that your weekly date night for a few months.

You know how in every household there’s a huge jar of spare change just lying around? We keep one on the bookshelf near our keys, and we dump any change we have into it so we don’t have to deal with it. Sometimes, I’ll fossick through it to get change if I’m heading out for a latte or something, but really I’m just after the gold coins and the silver all sits there.

So, you take that jar of change and you find your nearest bank with a change sorting machine.

It’s just like the pokies! You don’t have to do any counting, stacking, sorting or anything. You simply pour it in to the machine and it counts your money for you. At the end, it spits out a slip of paper which you take to the cashier and they give you proper money instead of 3 kilos of silver.

Whatever you reap from this little exercise is your budget for date night!

Our change was sitting in one of those little round plastic takeaway containers. Tiny and overflowing. Dumped it all into a sack, and then I commenced a search of the entire apartment. We found more change in the bottom of handbags, in the car, in drawers and on desks… We guesstimated we had around $65-$70 all up in our little kitty. Bonus! That’s more than double our normal date night budget.

We hauled it to the bank and nearly broke the machine with a rogue New Zealand coin and a paperclip (note to self: remove foreign objects) and then watched as the numbers ticked over.

Our jackpot in the end was $91.60! Add that to our normal $30 budget that we set aside for date night and you got $121.60.

So we headed for one of our favourite Melbourne restaurants: Yu-U. This is Japanese food at it’s finest, tucked away in a basement down a Melbourne alleyway. There is no signage out the front, there’s graffiti everywhere and you just open the door and slip inside to sublime Japanese minimalism and amazing sashimi. They are so reclusive we weren’t even allowed to take photos! I did manage a couple before I realised we were in trouble for doing it.

We had yellow fin tuna sashimi, melt-in-your-mouth Wagyu beef, Teriyaki salmon and eggplant with minced chicken… all delicious. We happily paid our $100 check and headed home for dessert and True Blood on the couch. An impromptu and lovely luxe date night for two.

I threw out the plastic takeaway container we were keeping our money in and have replaced it with a huge jar, at least 6 times the size. Can’t wait for it to fill up so we can go on an even more decadent date night next time!

What are you waiting for? Go find your spare change!

Big thanks to Little Miss Sorted for the idea!

– Kite… $15 from ebay
– Wind… $FREE
– Scenery… $FREE
– 1 idiot flying a kite $PRICELESS!

So this was Emma’s chance to pop my kite flying cherry. She had some flying experience – a few hours under her belt from when she was a child – but never with a stunt kite.

The Kite was bought from ebay (my favourite marketplace, delivered to right to my door) – it was cheap, simple to set up and totally breakable… it took me only a few goes before I had busted part of the kite. Em’s had fun, and some frustration; although, she managed to find more air than I did! It seemed like each time I took control of the reins the kite flew up with incredible speed, turn 180 degrees, locked on Emma as a target and then zoomed back down at breakneck speeds, only to crash into the ground a few feet from her. If anyone was watching they would swear I was doing it on purpose.

In My Opinion: I was expecting a little more out of flying a kite. I honestly didn’t think it would require much skill to keep it up in the air! Who knows, it probably doesn’t… maybe I just suck at it!

Things to consider: You may want to save this kind of date idea for summer – a warm day could have made this a much more pleasurable experience. We did it in the middle of winter (curse you southern hemisphere!) And, buy 2 kites – they’re cheap… if you break one at least you’ve got a spare.

USA – it’s still warm out, grab a kite and play with your sweetie before the cold of Fall hits you! Emma and I are hanging for summer to kick in (only a few months away…) I dare say Emma will want another crack at the kite then!

Fly a Kite
Let’s go fly a kite… up to the highest heights! I’ve had that song stuck in my head all week. Pick a clear, sunny day with a gentle breeze and head to a park for some kite flying. Bet you haven’t done it since you were a kid! It’s not as easy as it looks, either…

Borrow a Kid
You know what? You need to be really, really game to do this one. It’s on our worst dates list for a reason. Of course, it’s only fun if you don’t already own a child of your own. Great for clucky couples who are inches from having a baby – it provides great contraception. Should ward you off each other for at least another few months!

Kayaking
This one is not a $30 date, per say (Unless you find someone with a kayak willing to lend it to you for free) but if you’re the adventurous types, it’s a lot of fun. There’s open sea kayaking, or quiet river kayaking… if you’re nervous about it, go with an instructor or a tour group.

Karaoke
Find a bar with a private karaoke room and sing your little hearts out. Best you go for all the cheesy duets – Summer Lovin’, I Got You Babe… you know how it goes. Failing a night out, get Singstar and karaoke from your very own loungeroom.

Jump Yourself Silly
Ever seen one of those trampoline parks? They have indoor and outdoor ones, it’s basically Olympic-sized trampolines all set next to each other. You can bounce around while you play tiggy, dodgeball or kiss chasey.

Go for a Jog
Assuming you’re the active types (even better if you’re not) find nice afternoon for some light exercise and go for a jog together. Find a picturesque backdrop – a lake, a park – and get all sweaty together. A shower back at your place later is the perfect way to finish this one off.

Jazz Club
Live jazz has it’s own special brand of sexy. Find a cosy jazz club with great cocktails, dress up to the nines and enjoy a night together snuggled into a booth while listening to the twang of that double bass.

Japanese Night
There are two ways to have a Japanese night date – the first is to, obviously, head out to a Japanese restaurant.

The other is to try your hand at cooking traditional Japanese fare at home – if you’re really daring, try rolling your own sushi. Otherwise, stick to a chicken teriyaki or an udon noodle soup. Then settle in to watch a Japanese-themed movie together afterward – we love Lost in Translation.

Okay, what have I missed? Any other great J date ideas? Did you go on a date night this week?

The tables and chairs are retro, beaten up and old. The walls are made of the typical 80 ethnic fake wood grain which I am so well familiar with (it was the staple decor of the Croatian’s when I was growing up, and you can still find a small wall or two that looks like this my parents house today.)

The place was bustling and loud and full of vibrancy… but unfortunately for this date I wasn’t feeling the vibe of the place. Maybe cause it was my sixteenth-thousand time I’ve been there and I was accustomed to a certain type of expectation. This time around the food portions were small, and usually that PACK out your plate, and the prices… we broken the budget (argh, cardinal sin!) by $15! Luckily, I had placed a few extra dollars in my pocket! I literally walked out of that place with $1.70 left.

I kinda left going yeah, it was ok… but – I’ve had better date nights.

I guess there’s a moral to the story – have new experiences!

Expectations lead to disappointment… new experiences carry little to no expectations which makes it much easier to have a great time! Get out there and do new things!