In the clip, this waiter warns one couple that he has to see a “real kiss” for them to qualify for the promotion. He says that if they try to fake it he’ll know because he’s “kind of a specialist.”

So the kisses must be real, and you can’t pash the staff, sorry. Promotion runs every day of June, from 9-11am. BYO pucker partner, or test your luck in line and see if you can score a frugal but romantic singleton who’s willing to partner up just for the promotion!

Check out this video:

Congratulations, really. If you have done an entire alphabet worth of date ideas with your partner, you are amazing. Stop and give each other a literal pat on the back, or maybe a fist bump:

Without further ado, I present to you the last letter of the date night alphabet… but hopefully not the last date you will ever go on!

Zoo
Well, der. What else is there to say about this one? Go say hi the animals, grab an ice cream, watch feeding time… go awwwww over the otters (so cute).

In Melbourne, we have an Open Range Zoo with no cages, you can go on a mini safari which is pretty cool. If you have a zoo with a difference near you, go find it!

Zombies
Zombies are the new vampires. True story. Get a bunch of Zombie movies and have a themed movie marathon at home… or find a local Zombie walk where people dress up and go moaning through the streets of their city. Weird.

ZZZZZZZ…..
Don’t just go to sleep. That would be boring. But perhaps plan a full morning in bed together on the weekend. There’s nothing quite like lazing around on a Sunday together… organise some breakfast the night before, maybe cuddle up and watch a movie or read the paper… stare out the window and chat… have great morning sex.

Well that’s my ideas done. Comment below and tell us what you did for your Z date idea or what awesome thoughts you might have to add!

As a side note, we could not be more proud of you if you and your partner have made it all the way to Z. You are doing more for your relationship than a lot of other people, and hopefully all the fun you’ve had along the way has reinforced your commitment to each other, to date nights together and to doing new things with your partner. We hope you will continue to use our $30 Date Night generator and all our resources in your dating future.

Yoga

There are so many different types of yoga you can try together. Sweat it out in a Power class, lean on each other in a partner yoga class or find a studio near you that does flying yoga – doesn’t that sound like fun?

We did a Laughter Yoga class and it was awesome. Classes run for free all over the world. Find yourself a local class here.

YouTube
Make a video and upload it to YouTube as a lasting memory. You can set it on private if you wish – no one ever has to see it. Put a little piece of yourselves on the internet. Maybe it’s the two of you playing guitar and singing a song… maybe it’s a little video about how you met… you never know who might find it one day on Ancestry.com.. or if you’ll spark a trend (not to mention a video empire) like these crazy kids.

Yard Sales
Grab a couple of coffees and spend a Sunday morning trawling the yard sales with your $30 budget. Head for one of the swanky suburbs and see what you can find! One man’s trash…

What did you do/are you going to do for your Y Date Idea?

It was an afternoon spent at one of our favourite places – the Fairfield Boathouse. We got dressed up, we took out a rowboat, we walked memory lane… and we just happened to have a photographer with us too to capture all the fun!

The experience started with a very special delivery in the mail. A gorgeous scroll arrived, printed on handmade paper with gold threads running through it – and complete with a traditional wax seal featuring a tiny castle. I was immediately enchanted! The voucher invited us to experience a couples photography session.

Anyone that’s gritted their teeth through a day of wedding photos know how gruelling photo sessions have the potential to be. This was not one of those. Far from it.

Really, a photography session with Arek from Silver Castle Portraits feels much more like an amazing afternoon date than a stand-pose-smile-for-the-camera ordeal.

I barely realised he’d taken a photo by the time we were finished – though he’d been snapping away the whole time and had a whopping 800 frames to choose from at the end of it!

I love these photos. They really capture who Den and I are as a couple – they’re not cheesy, they’re not forced and they tell a story.

This is one thing Arek does very well. Before any photoshoot, he will come to your house to meet you, talk to you and get a sense of your relationship. We found ourselves laughing with him over coffees at our dining table as we talked about how we met, how Den proposed and schemed up locations that were special to us that we could use for the photoshoot.

Before he left, Arek gave us a pack full of everything from tips on what to wear and how to prepare for the shoot, through to a mysterious document marked “Top Secret” that listed a series of clandestine missions we were to carry out before the shoot.

I loved these the most – I’m not even sure I should tell you exactly what they are. Suffice to say, on the day it was these things that helped capture the pure, real emotion through memories and thoughtful gestures:

The session is spent reminiscing, laughing, hugging and even playing silly games:

We wanted to recapture the feeling one of our favourite date nights, which was taking a rowboat out on Central Park Lake in New York. The vintage rowboats at Fairfield Boathouse were perfect:

In the spirit of fun, we also took a bunch of colourful balloons along for the ride:

As the sun set, the light became magical and Arek kept snapping (bye bye, balloons!):

This is one of my favourite shots. Apparently I look at him like this all the time. I never knew:

When it was all over, Den and I stopped for dinner on the way home. It will be one of my most memorable date nights ever, not least because we have these actual, beautiful memories to keep forever now.

Once Arek has shortlisted and processed the images from your shoot, he will come back to your home with a very professional presentation of at least 30 images that will make for stunning, high-quality art for your walls.

You can order any of your favourites as wall prints, albums, photo boxes and more. Be warned: it will be hard to choose just one! Everything is so beautiful and special… What a wonderful piece of art to hang up in your home and look back on in years to come – so many people wait until after they have children to start family portraits, but the truth is the two of you are a family already, and that deserves to be celebrated and remembered.

To see more of the gorgeous images Arek took, head to the blog at Silver Castle Portraits. To make a booking so you can create your own meaningful wall art, phone 0467 676 205 or visit Silver Castle Portraits.

Silver Castle Portraits have given us one of their gorgeous gift scrolls that includes a complimentary photoshoot and $250 worth of photo credit to give away! That’s $450 worth of value altogether.

To be in the running, simply comment below with a valid email address and tell us where you would have your photoshoot done and why that place is special to you for your chance to win.

The best entry, as voted by us and Silver Castle Portraits, will win – competition closes on 24 June, 2013. Valid for residents of Melbourne, Australia only.

X-rated
Do something naughty together. Perhaps kick it up a notch from your usual boudoir routine to make it feel extra special. Pop into an adult toy store, put on a DVD or don a saucy costume… whatever it is, have fun with it and play out some fantasies.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, we love these naughty games for couples

X Marks the Spot
Set up a treasure hunt for your partner. We did this with the aid of a metal detector for a bit of fun, but a map or a series of clues would be just as much fun! Keep it in your house or widen out and take them on a chase through the neighbourhood.

Another way to interpret this date idea could be to go Geocaching, which is a fun treasure hunt for you both!

Read our Date Night Review on X Marks the Spot

Read our Date Night Review on Geocaching

Xbox Marathon
Challenge each other to an Xbox marathon. Grab some snacks and bunker down in your lounge room together for an intense afternoon of gaming. Trash talk, place bets on the outcomes (and fulfil them!) and have a bunch of fun while you’re at it.

Okay daters, what have we missed? Surely you can be more creative than this… help us (and everyone else) out with some more ideas!

This is so simple it’s stupid! Don’t read any further because you are running the risk of the following three letters come out of your mouth in succession: d.e.r.

There are times where Emma and I just don’t want to go out. Pfft, date night – who can be bothered? So, staying at home it is, and what could be easier than doing it at home with a good old fashioned “themed” cook up. Our theme of choice, Mexican!
It’s nothing fancy, it’s not difficult and it’s a whole lot of fun! This is what we did.

The Food – home made of course: recipe for fish tacos came directly from the internet – this is exactly what we did – view here

• Fish Tacos ($18)
• Guacamole Dip ($8)
• Spanish Imported Wine ($9) – its the closest thing I could find

For the gents: I NEVER cook at home. Emma would be lucky to catch me cooking less than 3 times per year (unless it’s on the BBQ). But in all honesty it’s so hard to mess this recipe up – just do what it says.

The Entertainment:
- Mexican music (easily sourced from Spotify)
- Mexican movies: These were my 3 picks, each of these movies have a high IMDB rating.

• Amores Perros
• For The Greater Glory
• Talk to Her

What I love about the themed cook ups: It’s not overwhelming; we plan it and make it happen together. And there’s hardly any research required. Best of all, it’s something new and different.

This date idea just came together without much thought at all. Earlier that day I spent 2 minutes googling for a recipe for fish tacos, and then another 2 minutes for a cheap Spanish / Mexican wine. Emma suggested we try finding Mexican music on Spotify, which turned out awesome.

Buying ingredients is straight forward. Always check your cupboards to see what’s in there first.
We cracked open the bottle of wine first (naturally), then started off making the guacamole munching into that while I got to work on the fish tacos. Fish tacos is a bit of a process, but man-oh-man it was delicious!

All in all, a nice way to spend 90 minutes together cooking, eating, and drinking. Mexican was something we’ve never done before as a date idea which is great! Afterwards was movie time – a simple and easy way to spend an evening.

I love this date idea; You can make it even more fun if you preplanned some props. Maybe a Mexican hat or other classic Mexican themes. Really if you wanted to go all out, you could make it a fun surprise. But for us – we were tired, we weren’t in the mood to take any photos, just wanted to hang out a bit and enjoy each other’s company.

Stuck for something fun to do? Try a themed night in; here is an Italian night in that we did back in September of 2008! $30 Date Night does Italian Night In

Other options include:

• French
• Japanese
• Indian
• Russian

And the list can continues! Don’t sit around waiting for fun to happen, it’s easy, its simple and it’s only $30! Get onto your own themed date night this week and tell us how it went!

And aliens.

And zombies. Zombies are our most real threat, what with the impending Zombie Apocalypse and all.

But ghosts, mainly. Especially in light of this recent Reddit thread…!

But because I’m an amazing wife, you know what I organised for date night recently?

A ghost tour.

Because I knew Den would love it.

Den loves history. His curiosity for everything around him is boundless. He likes to know how stuff works, what it’s there for and how it got there in the first place. We can’t go anywhere without him discovering something new and being utterly fascinated by it. He was the kind of kid that pulled apart remote control cars to see what was going on inside them. Now that he’s grown up, he still pulls apart his toys (phones, computers, cars, motorbikes)… difference now is, he puts them back together again!

Anyway, I knew this ghost tour would be right up Den’s alley because the Ghosts of Old Williamstown tour is not strictly about spectres and spooks… it’s also about the rich and somewhat shady history of Victoria’s oldest city.

I figured no matter how I felt about ghosts, I should be fairly safe in a group. Right? RIGHT?

Den had no idea what we were doing until we rolled right into the middle of the tour group, meeting at the beginning of the night at a haunted fountain in the main street, Williamstown.

Our guide, Anne, had donned black fingerless lace gloves and a long swishy black skirt for the night. She wove stories for us as she led us by lantern-light through King William’s town, painting a picture of a world very different to the one we inhabit now.

So many buildings in Williamstown have a story. Many also have ghosts.

At first, we were safely across the road from these buildings as we heard stories of corruption and death and love… the castle ‘Craigantina’ built for the wife of John Harker Craig (and still haunted by her to this day), makeshift morgues in the basements of old pubs and sailors dying as they tried, drunk, to swim the bay back to their ships.

These conceptual stories, I felt fine with and I began to relax thinking perhaps this tour wouldn’t be so spooky after all.

Wrong.

Anne pointed out a narrow alleyway across the road from us, recounting the history of the pub it backed onto and the nasty publican who still floats around the building making people feel unwelcome.

Then she told us we were going down it.

Single file, we all shuffled down to a walled space at the very end of the dark alleyway. There’s a light that isn’t connected to a sensor, and sometimes it flicks on for no reason. Right on cue, it flooded us with light as we squeezed past.

Down the very end of the laneway, we huddled into a tight space as Anne explained the history of the lane. I was taking photos all around, on the off chance we might see something later when we looked at them. Orbs of light and unexplainable shadows are sometimes visible in photos taken on Lantern ghost tours. Things that weren’t there when you were standing there, but mysteriously appear later when you look a little closer.

Den was standing next to me, itching his nose. He figured it was allergies, perhaps from being in close confines to someone that had been hugging their cat before they left home.

The itch wouldn’t let up, as we listened to Anne tell us how prostitutes would line this laneway waiting for customers, enticing them into the dark. Some of their spirits are still around. Women on the tours often report feeling unwelcome. Men, on the other hand, seem to love this laneway. They report flirting – a lot seem to get ticked around the face with feather boas.

Den looked at me in alarm. Animal hair, or flirty working girl from another century? The first of many questions for the night…

We moved on to the old Quarantine tunnels, where entire shiploads of people would be imprisoned if there was illness on their boat as they came into port. Thousands died there, contracting all manner of ancient fevers…

Den is still sceptical about this one, but from the minute we stood in front of the tunnels I started on a coughing fit I couldn’t control. Even before Anne had explained the tunnels and their history, I was coughing loudly and without respite… I continued coughing the entire time we stood there. It let up as soon as we moved away.

This is what I kind of loved about the ghost tour – our group didn’t see any full-bodied apparitions or anything like that (thank God, as it’s likely I would have run screaming and never set foot across the Westgate again) but all night freaky stuff happened that could well have been a ghost, but you could also have explained away as coincidence, should you be too freaked out to deal with it.

Anne had many keys to many doors in Williamstown. She took us into the old lighthouse, the very first morgue in Victoria, rebuilt stone-by-stone on the docks, into an old shipping shed and past many buildings with stories caught in their walls.

Den held divining rods in the morgue which crossed over as we called to the ghosts, he swears it wasn’t him and you could actually physically see the rod pull and vibrate before it swung around. I felt violently ill to the stomach for a few moments in the morgue.

A few suspicious noises and cool breezes (indoors on a still, 34-degree night) also factored into our night… Anne, our tour guide even got a little impressed upon by a ghost and had to tell him to back off in the shipping shed – it’s a new venue added recently to the tour so the spirits there are anxious to make contact. The venue itself was used to shoot some scenes recently for an Australian production and some of the crew walked off the job, too freaked out to return.

We had a great time on this date night! A few solid hours of spine-tingling, informative, entertaining fun. We’ve been telling everyone all about it, and we think you should go too!

Lantern Ghost Tours
The Ghosts of Old Williamstown tour is $30 per adult and The Old Melbourne Ghost Tour is $25 per adult but they are both well worth breaking your usual date night budget!

Would you do this on a date night?

Water
Find a date you can do on the water. Be it a café near the water, fishing on a jetty, going for a swim, snorkelling or taking out a rowboat. Get creative and see what you can come up with. At a pinch, jump in the bath together for a great night!

We love a water date at the beach (the nude beach) – read that review here.

And we love an old-fashioned rowboat too – read that review here.

Whisky/Wine Tasting
Find a local bar that holds regular whisky or wine tasting nights with the makers. Learn something new and wrap your tongue around some delicious indulgences while you’re there! If you live near wine country, a drive to some cellar doors will do the trick!

We did this one – read our review here.

Walking Tour
Join up an organised walking tour or take your own tour in your nearest city. Many tourist bureaus offer self-guided tours, or you can get online ahead of time and download tours for a small fee, hook them up on your iPods and follow along. Stop along the way for coffee/lunch/cake and discover the hidden secrets your very own city holds.

We took a walking tour of Melbourne – read the date review here.

We took a Photography Walking Tour of Melbourne – read the date review here.

Water Fight
Arm yourselves with water bombs and squirter guns and head to a park near you. Dress in camouflage if you’re really serious. Set up some war games – plant a flag that you have to claim, or defend a fort. Hide behind trees, ambush each other and squeal like kids. Dry off in the sun together afterwards over ice cream.

Walk in the Woods
Strap on your hiking shoes and go for a walk together in the woods. National park trails, waterfalls, beautiful scenery. Picnic is optional.

Whipped Cream
I’m sure you can use your imagination on this one….

Waltz
Always wanted to whisk yourselves around a dance floor like Ginger and Fred? Find a dance school that will teach you how to waltz – first lessons are often free at social classes.

Window Shopping
Like actual shopping, without spending a dime. Put on your fashionable clothes and hit the luxury shops and designer boutiques in your area. Dream. Have fun! Try stuff on. Go for lunch afterwards.

Photo credit: Observando

Veggie Patch
Build yourselves a veggie patch at home! If you don’t have much space, don’t despair. Plenty of people manage to grow a mini crop on their balconies. Go on an adventure to gather all your materials and get planting! Even if it’s just a window box of herbs you can cultivate so you always have fresh parsley in the house. Carrots, beans and tomatoes are among the easiest to grow veggies for beginners, and all can be popped into a deep pot rather than straight into the earth.

Vietnamese Food
Vietnamese food is fresh, healthy and packed with flavour. Try a big steaming bowl of Pho – like traditional chicken soup, it’s really cleansing and great for what ails you.

Violin Recital
The sound of a string quartet is so uplifting. We had a group play at our wedding ceremony and it was beautiful. I teared up as I came into the church and heard them strike up Pachelbel’s Canon. Find a recital or concert near you and go along to soak up the beautiful sounds of the strings.

Vampire
The easiest way I can think of to have a Vampire-related date is a movie marathon. Or perhaps a True Blood marathon. Spend the day (it’s safer during the day) huddled together on the couch with snacks watching the likes of Brahm Stoker’s Dracula, The Lost Boys and From Dusk til Dawn – great vampire movies without a sparkly supernatural being in sight.

Video
Do you film each other often? (I don’t mean in that way!) If not, consider making a little keepsake video together – something you can keep and look back on years from now, something your potential future grandchildren might see… make it as personal, or funny, or silly as you want. You don’t have to upload it to YouTube or anything.

Vineyard
Take a day trip to visit the vineyards – cellar door tastings, a drive through the countryside, a lunch of local produce. Bliss!

Volleyball
You can play, or you can watch. I’m sure you already know which you would prefer as a couple!

Veal (Schnitzel)
Find an Eastern European restaurant near you that serves a traditional veal schnitzel – thin fillet, crisp crumb outer layer… yum! The local Hungarian restaurant in our neighbourhood even does Schnitzel Happy Hour

Photo Credit: Vampire by Anne Wipf