8th Anniversary Fun!

It's been almost a week since our 8th anniversary, and I've been so busy telling you about our scavenger hunts and chocolate trails and amazing Airbnb that I've neglected telling you about the day itself! So here you go!

Our anniversary was actually the ONLY day that week we saw the sun. It was cold, but we praised the Lord for blessings like sunshine!!

The morning of our anniversary, we got up and opened our gifts first thing. (Kind of like our wedding day!) We were both super excited about what we'd gotten each other. I got Ryan a couple of coffee related gifts for Abby the RV! We decided to get a kettle and stainless steel French press for our travels, rather than a regular coffee pot or a Keurig. So...I got those for him!

And I was MELTING over the gift he gave me: he made a book of his favorite things about me and our life together. (It included photos!) It is perfect.

We went downstairs to get our free breakfast and lattes for the day. We saved our breakfast to eat later and drank lattes because...of course!

We spent the morning making some stops on both the chocolate trail and the scavenger hunt, and after we went to Abbott's Candies, we went around the corner to Willie and Red's, which is actually a buffet. I wasn't sure buffets still exited in pandemic days, but they do, and it was interesting how they did it. We walked along the front of the buffet and pointed to what we wanted, and the server behind the buffet dished it out for us and handed us our plate at the end. The food was good, though my salad did swim in dressing a bit more than I would have chosen. I just tried to shake out the veggies to minimize excess. I don't think the lady serving me could hear me through my mask and over the double glass buffet barrier. 

We continued our scavenger hunting and our chocolate trailing in the afternoon and ended our day out with a stop at Thistlethwaite Falls. According to the sign at the trailhead of the falls, back in the mid-1850s, a man named Timothy Thistlethwaite and his brother-in-law created a dam in the river. They used farm teams to place large boulders in the river channel to change the course of the river so it would flow into a new channel and over a rocky ledge...creating the falls. And it still stands. There used to be a saw mill associated with the falls, but it no longer exists. The falls sure are pretty, though! 

It took us a while to find it - because we expected it to be deep on a trail. We eventually found it RIGHT BESIDE THE ROAD. Facepalm. We used this as our backdrop for our annual recreation pictures!

I'll show you the recreation pictures at the end!

After we left here, we headed back to the Airbnb, where we warmed up the food we'd gotten for breakfast and ate it for dinner!

We had our sparkling grape juice, watched our wedding video, enjoyed our chocolate trail freebie chocolate chip muffins, and read the letters we wrote each other last year before writing new ones for next year!

It was the perfect day of fun - without being too full! Tons of reminiscing and enjoying our memories - while making new ones!

And here are our recreated pictures...I love getting to see how they change from year to year.