11th Anniversary Trip...Eleven Actual Years

 

I’m back with a few more stories from our anniversary trip – and this one is from our actual anniversary.

            The day turned out to be lackluster in weather again, but at least it wasn’t pouring. We were happy for that. It was super windy, though, so after we got up and ready, we decided to do our annual photo recreation inside at our loft. We’ve never before taken those pictures inside, but we really liked how they turned out in the end. (I haven’t made the collages yet, so you’ll have to see those later.)

            We also exchanged our gifts in the morning, and that was a lot of fun. The 11^th anniversary theme is steel, which presents some awkward challenges. I gave Ryan a wrench set and meat claws that he had on his list. I tried to make them extra fun by doing a play on words with wrench and claw and how I hoped the last 11 years hadn’t made him want to claw his eyes out and that I hadn’t thrown a wrench in everything. (Something along those lines.) Made him laugh!

    

        He gave me a beautiful necklace and some earrings, but alas, he accidentally purchased the wrong earrings. These were cuff earrings meant to clasp around the earlobe. And of course, my earlobes must be weird, because they wouldn’t work on mine. (Is it a bad day when earrings don’t fit? Ha!) We have since exchanged them for the correct earrings, which look exactly the same, but with a pierced post. I love them!

            We headed out for lunch at this restaurant called Eleven Eleven. Is there any more perfect spot to eat lunch on an eleventh anniversary than Eleven Eleven?

            We’ll never know. They were closed.

            CLOSED!

            Apparently they have different hours on Saturday than the rest of the week and I didn’t catch that. So we got this picture with the building and went on our merry way to try to find something else to eat instead.

            We ended up downtown at Sugarfire BBQ. It was featured on TV and had quite the line. But, much like Chick-fil-A, they kept things moving quickly. We probably only waited in line about a half hour – MAYBE 45 minutes – and they even had tables left.

            I got a salad with brisket on top, and Ryan got this delightful (and tall!) sandwich. We each got a piece of pie for later, and Ryan said that we probably enjoyed the meal even more than the original plan.

            We thought we would go to the Arch after lunch, but unfortunately, they were sold out of tickets to ride to the top. (In fairness, the website did say to buy in advance, but because the weather was so bad, we kept changing the day we were going. Some days we couldn’t even see the top of it because of the clouds.)

            The cool thing about the Arch, though, is that even if you can’t ride to the top, you can go (for free!) into the museum area, so we did that. For once in our lives, it was Ryan that had to go through security multiple times, and I got right through!)

            We sat in the sample tram car to see what it would have been like to be packed in there to ride up. FIVE PEOPLE in this little space. Whew. That’s very close. I actually did ride in one of these when I was little – and I will have to find that picture to share with you sometime. I was much smaller then.

            We also found a sample cross-section of what it’s like to be in the very top of the Arch and look out the windows. That was kind of fun!

            We got coffee and had a little date in the Arch café, and then we called it a day.

            We came home, had our coffee and pie, watched our wedding video, and enjoyed a quiet evening back at the Airbnb!

            It may have been a mishap-filled day, but we loved it anyway. Happy eleven years to us!!!