A Year Already?

Holy schnikes, it's been a year already! Darr and I were married last year on June 25 in the small white church less than a block away from our house. To celebrate surviving our first year, we dropped Beauty the wonder dog off at Uncle Nick's and hit the road in Sophie the Mini Cooper. Since we are both procrastinators we didn't make plans in advance. Translated this means we didn't have anything booked or figured out beforehand, which can lead to some stress and anxiety, but luckily it all turned out fabulously - even with the super hot temperatures over the weekend. We stayed Friday night at the Columbia Gorge Hotel. Thankfully, they had a room available for us when we rolled up around 10pm. The staff was courteous and helpful, delivering champagne glasses and plates and forks (for our champagne and chantilly cake from Piece of Cake) to our room, which we then carried back downstairs and consumed outside, sitting on a wooden swing overlooking the Columbia River. Even the swooping bats seemed somehow romantic. Okay, that's not true. Bats are never romantic. I lied.

The following morning we ate the World Famous Farm Breakfast. Really this meal is comprised of enough food to feed a small nation. We did our best to plow through it with the appropriate level of gusto and enthusiasm. It's a lot of food. Seriously. A lot. Shortly after breakfast was done, we walked around the hotel grounds a little and Darr got bit by a tick. We discovered the little bugger when we went back to our room to grab our gear and check out. Again, the fabulous hotel staff was on hand to help - a good thing as I was/am ill-equipped to handle, well, anything involving ticks.

De-ticked and with bags in hand, we jumped into Sophie, got back on I-84, and headed east. Before noon we stopped at the Maryhill Museum of Art in Washington and spent some time roaming around the air-conditioned museum before driving a few miles away to walk around Washington's very own version of Stonehenge. (Probably not as cool as the real thing, eh?) Then it was back on the road, traveling to nowhere in particular. Sometime around 2pm we left the main road and turned onto one of those scary gravel BLM roads that lead to nowhere. Our nowhere was along the Deschutes River. It was hot, damn hot, so hot you could do a little crotchpot cooking (I swiped that last one from Good Morning, Vietnam). We manufactured shade using the rain cover for our tent and then napped, dangled our feet in the cold, cold water, played cards, read our books, ate, and eventually became so overheated we dipped our shirts in the water (it was too cold and too rapid-like to just jump in) and then put the wet shirts back on to cool ourselves. This process worked so successfully we used it throughout the rest of the day. Awww, refreshing...

Sunday morning, we drove down to Bend, ate another insanely large breakfast, and headed for home. Sophie the Mini is a great car for road trips. I highly recommend buying one should you be a fan of the open road. Pics from our trip can be seen by clicking here. So now, we're a day into year two. 364 days left.

Side note: Darren didn't take the bait on the one-year anniversary band, which I suppose is okay as there isn't really an anniversary band until year two.