Our Silver Anniversary

Vicki and I have returned from a wonderful trip together, but before I tell about that I'd like to focus on Jenna. We took her to the airport yesterday afternoon and sent her off for a month long visit to Eswatini, Africa, a country formerly known as Swaziland. Eswatini is a landlocked country situated between South Africa and Mozambique. Jenna will be serving with the Luke Commission (https://www.lukecommission.org), doing whatever is needed, but most likely helping with medical clinics similar to what she has done before in Haiti. This experience is counting as an internship in her course of study at Trevecca.

On the fun side, Jenna had a 10 hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany, today. Her boyfriend, Nolan, is in Europe right now. He and a friend arrived in Amsterdam a few weeks ago to celebrate Pentecost. They are currently biking across the continent as they head to a monastery somewhere in France where they plan to spend six weeks with the monks there. Nolan took the bus over to Frankfurt to spend the day with Jenna and we got pictures of them in front of a castle they toured. All too soon their day together was over and they headed their separate ways.

Vicki and I are both fine with sending Jenna out. It was, admittedly, a little hard to watch her disappear after going through security, but she is in God's hands which are far better than ours. Jenna will return July 25. (Nolan gets home some time in the middle of August.) She won't have much access to the Internet while she is away, but we will get weekly updates from her. Still, there may not be much for me to report here until she returns.

Getting back to our anniversary trip, we decided a couple of months ago to celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary by getting out of town. Our anniversary was actually Tuesday of last week (the 18th), but since the boys were going with our church youth group to Orange Beach, Alabama, this past weekend and Jenna didn’t mind being left home alone to prepare for her trip we decided to book our trip while the boys were away.

When we started planning our trip we asked ourselves where would be a fun destination that we could easily fly to from Nashville. Colorado kept floating to the top on the list so Vicki went to work. Here is what we did.

Last Friday morning we saw the boys off on their trip and then packed and headed to the airport. Our plane was a direct flight to Denver. This was the only bad part of our trip, though it wasn’t Southwest’s fault. They had no way to control the severe storms that had closed the Denver airport when we needed to land. Holding in the air as long as we could we were eventually diverted to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to refuel. As the weather in Denver persisted they let us deplane and walk around the airport there for a couple of hours. When the weather cleared we were on our way, though arriving some 5-6 hours late. Just about everyone on the plane was a good sport about the delay. The poor folks going on to San Diego had bigger problems as the rest of the flight was canceled. On the ground we picked up our rental car (it was actually an SUV, a Toyota Sequoia) and drove to Estes Park in the rain for our first night. The only place we could find that was still open for supper was McDonalds. We arrived at our hotel about 11:30.

Saturday morning we enjoyed a big breakfast at the Big Horn restaurant and then drove up into the Rocky Mountain National Park. We saw the most incredible scenery, as we did the whole trip, and got pretty high up until the road was closed. The ranger told us there was 1-5 feet of snow covering the road ahead. We had planned to do a little hiking while in the park, but feeling the effects of the altitude we changed our plans.

Back down the mountain we spent a couple of hours shopping in Estes Park. There is a lot to see and do there and once we had our fill we got back on the road for Dillon, Colorado, before the rain returned. This leg of the trip took us over (and under) the mountains and to the western side of the Continental Divide. Once checked into our hotel we drove over to Breckinridge for supper at Giampietro Pizzaria. We were going to walk around town a little, but it started raining and then spitting snow so we decided to head back to our hotel.

Sunday morning we were back on the road to Cañon City, Colorado. We enjoyed some of the best and most diverse scenery on this drive, taking lonely state highways where we hardly met anyone on the road. In Cañon City we boarded the Royal Gorge Railroad for the two hour excursion they offer, which, again, was incredible.

After our train ride we drove up to Colorado Springs for our third night stay. I had always heard about Aunt Mar getting sick with bronchiectasis a few years after graduating from high school (which was 1934) and being sent to Cragmore Sanatorium in Colorado Springs for a year to recover. Doing a little research I learned that the old hospital building still stands and is now Main Hall, an administration building, on the campus of the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. So, we drove over to the campus and walked around the building. From there we went over to Garden of the Gods park and hiked around the rock formations there. We enjoyed living vicariously through two rock climbers scaling one of the formations (I think it was Cathedral Spires). Incidentally, Darice and Emily flew out to Colorado on Sunday. Emily sings in a choir and they are here with the choir. They were above us on Pike’s Peak while we were taking in the view of the mountain. We capped off the day with supper at Saltgrass Steak House.

Monday morning we drove up to Pike’s Peak which was a highlight of our trip. This mountain, while impressive from below, is truly remarkable from the summit which is 14,115 feet above sea level and commands a spectacular view of a large part of Colorado. I certainly hated to leave, but feeling the effects of the altitude I was also glad to come back down. By the way, they were setting up for the Pike's Peak International Hillclimb, an annual race which happens tomorrow. There's plenty of cool videos on this race on YouTube.

From here we drove up to Lakewood, which is a suburb of Denver, for our last night. After checking in we headed over to Red Rocks Amphitheatre where we saw Stevie Wonder in concert. It was an incredible venue for a legendary entertainer and the evening made an epic ending to our anniversary adventure.

Tuesday we returned our rental car--having put over 500 miles on it--had fun playing corn hole in the airport, reflecting on our trip as we ate lunch, and had an uneventful flight home. Now we’re back in the routine. That’s okay because I had a wonderful time with Vicki and she with me.

Joe