Before we begin the series of posts about our one year of monthly date nights, Daisy and Mack would like to wish you all a happy Fall.
We decorated our porch today for Fall today. Everyone got in the spirit. We even got Mack to keep still for 30 seconds so we could take a picture. Daisy on the other hand would sit all day and let you take her picture. She's kind of a ham when the camera comes out.
She also a big lover, believe it or not.
Ok so moving on (or moving back I guess). This is the first of four posts regarding our monthly date nights over the past year. It all officially started on our 8th wedding anniversary, a year ago August. For our anniversary, I gave Scott a basket with 12 sealed envelopes in it. Each envelope was labeled with a different month and contained a planned date night for that month. He was not allowed to open the envelopes until the first day of that month. Being that our anniversary is in August, the first envelope he had to open for was September.
September's date night was a Crater Lake Adventure. I had called and made reservations to ride the boat on Crater Lake. Neither of us had ever done this before, but it was always something we talked about.
There is only one way to access the boat, and that one way is to hike down to Cleetwood Cove. The hike down is nothing. It's knowing that every step you take down will be two steps back up that makes it a little rough.
I think this little guy wanted to go with us on the boat.
Crater Lake is one of the most beautiful places in America. The water is so clear. It's also very cold. Of the people who visit Crater Lake every year, only a fraction actually make the hike down to the water. We had to take this opportunity to actually get our feet wet.
The weather was absolutely beautiful! As you go around the lake in the boat, the park ranger points out things you should look at; things you can only see from this angle.
But you know it's going to be good when the park ranger literally throws down the microphone and scrambles to get his camera out. Towards the end of our boat ride we saw a large dust cloud along the shoreline. This dust cloud kept getting bigger and bigger. Then it hit us all that we were witnessing a large landslide. The park ranger got so excited and said that in all the years he has been giving the tour he has never seen a landslide that big. This picture really doesn't do it justice.
When I made the boat reservations I also made reservations for dinner at the lodge. Again, something we had always talked about but never did. The problem was that the only time they had was 5:10pm. The boat didn't dock at the bottom of Cleetwood Cove until 4:30pm. We not only had a 20 minute drive back to the lodge, but we had to still get up the 700 feet accent back to the parking lot. The equivalent of 70 flights of stairs can take an average of an hour. We had to do this in 20 minutes if we planned to make our reservations.
We made it back up the trail in record time and headed towards the lodge. There is no cell reception at Crater Lake so we couldn't call the lodge and let them know we were still coming. We decided that Scott would drop me off and then go park the truck. I went running into the lodge (10 minutes late) walking straight up to the seating hostess. I told her we had a reservation and apologized for being late. She said not to worry she knew we were going to be late because my husband called about 15 minutes ago to let them know. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, but at that point I decided to just go with it. We never did figure out what she was talking about, but someone was looking out for us and we got to enjoy a wonderful meal. If you ever get the chance to have dinner at Crater Lake Lodge, take it!
For October date night, we visited a local pumpkin patch to select the perfect Halloween pumpkins. It was a beautiful fall sunday. There were a few other families at the pumpkin patch.
At this particular pumpkin patch you had to actually cut the pumpkins off the vine yourself. You really felt like once you cut the pumpkin, you were obligated to keep it. But as sure as you would find the perfect pumpkin, cut it, and start to walk back to the wheelbarrow you would see the most perfect pumpkin just out of the corner of your eye. You also had to have that one.
That is how you end up with a wheelbarrow full of "perfect" pumpkins.
We then took our pumpkins home to carve. I don't think that Scott and I have ever carved pumpkins together before. I am a very non-creative carver, where as Scott is very detailed in his carving.
You can probably guess which simple pumpkin is mine and which detailed pumpkin is Scott's. And in case you were wondering, no we still did not get one trick-or-treater again this year even with these fantastic pumpkins decorating our front porch!
November's date night was a nice quiet night at home putting together a puzzle. We picked a puzzle, got our puzzle table out, found a good movie on the television, popped some popcorn, and got started. Like most people, we put the outside of the puzzle together first. We quickly realized that the puzzle was too big to fit on our puzzle table. That was the end of putting the puzzle together. I don't think Scott was real excited about this one anyway.
So there you have the first three months of date night. Check back to see what adventures we had in December, January, and February.
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