Leavenworth!

This year will be our second anniversary in December. I wanted to do something fun, but December 16th is right in the middle of a bunch of exams for Greg and choir concert rehearsals and Enrichment at church...etc. And Leavenworth happens to be kind of on the way to our parent's house, so I thought it'd be a fun surprise to take Greg there on the way to our Thanksgiving visit!

I secretly made the hotel reservations and a map (google maps are great!), and then told Greg that I would drive the first half and he could just sleep until I was tired of driving. This is was a little scary for me, because he is the navigator and always tells me what exit I'm supposed to take and looks at the map for me. I had studied the map a lot though and learned the names of the cities we should be driving through so I thought I'd be ok. And everything was fine until I passed a sign for Ritzville. It was pointing off to the right and said Ritzville was 30 miles away. Greg was just barely falling asleep by then, so when I pulled over to quietly look at my map and try not to panic Greg woke up and said, "Hey, what's going on?" I almost had to tell him we were going to Leavenworth, but I was trying to still keep it a secret, so I said, "Well, Mom always says it's better to go through Ritzville so that's what I wanted to do. I made my own map and was trying to do it by myself so you could just relax." But going back to Ritzville didn't really make sense and was out of the way, as Greg explained, so I had to just say, "Greg, there's something you don't know. Go back to sleep." Hahaha! He kind of got the message that something was up and just let it go.

He woke up again when we got close to Wenatchee and we had fun looking at the big dam and driving along the river. I wanted to just pull up at the hotel and let him figure it out when I got our room key, but I couldn't find it. It was too hard to watch the road and search all the buildings on the side at the same time, so I told him and then he helped me find it. He was really exciting and glad for the fun surprise to just have a day to be together just us. It's been kind of hard lately with all his school study groups and things that he's involved in.

So we got our stuff set up in our room and then went to Leavenworth around noon. We spent the day walking around poking around in little shops. I liked to see all the Christmas things, and Greg really liked the hat shop and the Australian shop. And yes, the Christmas lights were up too! I think they had just gotten the lights up recently because there was a line of big trees in the park, and they were just putting the lights on the last one that day. It was pretty impressive!

One thing we got was a chunk of really good peanut butter chocolate fudge. We had little slivers of it later for a treat before bed. We also had a nice dinner at a restraunt that looked like a wood cabin inside. They sat us next to real fire (not a tv screen with video of fire--like in one of the shops we saw.). Our server was really nice and had time enough to take care of us. We colored the kids menu while we waited for our food. We both got fancy burgers (well, mine was chicken) that tasted great. Then on the way back to the hotel we stopped and got hot fudge sundaes. Yum!

The next day was Sunday, so we had some banana bread and coffee cake (that I had made at home) for breakfast. We had a nice leisurely morning and then hit the road around 11:30am towards Gig Harbor.

Happy Anniversary Darling!