Every year for our Anniversary, I like to plan a little getaway for Sam and myself. Our first year, we drove up to Lake Powell for a few days, and boy oh boy, was it ever an adventure. Pretty much everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, but we had a blast anyways. I had surprised Sam by renting a Bayliner to take out on the lake for a day...and he could not have been less thrilled. He's got a bit of a hangup about renting expensive things: He's always afraid that he'll wreck it or break something and then we'll be out thousands of dollars in the end to repair it. So he was very adamant that we NOT rent the boat. It ended up working out delightfully in the end because a storm rolled in on that very day, and there were 70 mile per hour winds that were picking up sand, making huge waves, and destroying everything. We drove down to a beach that morning, and while everyone was out "enjoying" the lake, their belongings were all flying out into the water. It made me very thankful that the whole boating situation didn't really work out.
Speaking of "driving down to the beach", I had a little Mitsubishi at the time, and, being mid-August in Lake Powell, the sand was very dry. Needless to say, we almost got stuck in sand on multiple occasions. We ended up just crashing in our motel room for the rest of the day, watching a reality t.v. show marathon about Maximum Security Prisons and a few "World's Strangest Animals".
Now, about our motel: Page is packed pretty much all summer, and it's harder than you could ever imagine trying to get a decent hotel room. So, we didn't. We ended up at the local Travelodge and it was something else. First of all, it was party central with crazed, drunk rich hillbillies that had spent a little too much time drinking in the hot sun all day. Then they would come back in the afternoon and cause quite a ruckus. It was horrible. Then, after going out for a romantic sushi dinner one night (that included the most awkward shoulder massage EVER), we returned to find that the entire motel's sewer had backed up into our bathtub, and the smell was horrendous. I ran over to the Main Office, and they told us that the rest of the motel was totally booked and they really couldn't do anything to help us. Well, once the maintenance guy caught a whiff of the situation brewing in our room, he went over and convinced the manager to find us a room at a different hotel because there was no way we could stay there. After about an hour of phone calls, they managed to find us a room at a Best Western that ended up being really nice! We packed all of our disgusting, stinky belongings into the trunk and hauled ass out of there.
We ended up doing a tour of the dam and got in some swimming while we were there, along with a pretty incredible trip up to Antelope Canyon...that experience made the whole trip for me. But once we started heading back towards home on Sunday afternoon, my Alternator belt snapped and was flapping around under the hood. Luckily, we made it to the local Auto Zone and asked the attendant if there were any mechanics around on a Sunday to fix our belt so we could head home. He kindly offered to repair it for us, and about 2 hours and $13.00 later, we were back on the road.
For Anniversary #2, we went to San Diego for a few days to hit the beach and see Jamie Cullum perform at Humphrey's By the Bay...probably one of the best concerts I've been to. It was fabulous.
Anniversary #3, we kept it relatively low key and got ourselves a room at the Hyatt Regency in Scottsdale, swam, ate hummus, and took naps :)
Anniversary #4 took us to San Francisco, where we rented a royal blue Mustang Convertible to drive down the coast. I didn't end up planning the trip out as well as I should have because the scenic stuff that we were excited to check out was much further from San Francisco that we thought, and most of our trip was spent just driving to the locations. We wandered around Santa Cruz, drove down to Carmel, explored the Muir Woods, got stuck in serious construction traffic at the Bixby Bridge, watched Shark Week in our hotel room over In-N-Out, and generally just had a great time together.
Since we didn't get our fill on Anniversary #4, I decided that we should go back for Anniversary #5, and enjoy the area a little bit more. This time, we flew directly into Monterey and stayed at the cutest motel ever there. We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, hit up an awesome bar with over 75 beers on tap, wandered around town with Hot Cocoas and got caramel apples, spent some time on the beach, got in some hiking in Big Sur, wandered around Carmel-by-the-Sea, ate some amazing food...it was absolutely perfect. The first day, we went to Point Lobos State Park, and it was kind of foggy and eerily quiet. We stuck around for a few hours because it was just so beautiful and peaceful...it felt unreal to be perfectly honest. That was probably the highlight of the trip for me.
So this year, for Anniversary #6, I decided to take us somewhere neither of us has been before. I've wanted to see a concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheater since I can remember, so I decided to look up their website and see if anybody was playing there that we might be interested. Sure enough, the Dirty Heads and Pepper were scheduled to play on August 13! Our Anniversary is on the 16th, and the Fall Semester for Sam's EMT class starts the 18th, so it kind of worked out perfectly! Neither Sam nor I have ever been to Colorado, so I've been trying to put together an itinerary including whitewater rafting, hiking, shooting, visiting a couple of Sam's long-lost cousins that he hasn't seen in over a decade and some sights along the road trip through Moab. I made up a little "Inspiration Collage" of everything I've researched and included in the itinerary, and when I see it all put together, I couldn't be more excited! The only problem is, I think we'll probably come home thoroughly exhausted...just the way I like it :)
