Happy Anniversary to us!

For our 9th anniversary (ninth!) Gabe and I deposited our rambunctious little boys with Grandma and Grandpa, wished them well (the grandparents that is - the kids were ecstatic) and took off to Joshua Tree for some rock climbing!



We went with Joshua Tree Guides, which took all the "how do we do this safely?" questions out of the mix, leaving just the fun! Our guide Miriam was knowlegeable and fun; not only did she have us climbing rock faces,





she also took us scrambling inside one of those crazy piles of rock that you see all over the Joshua Tree National Forest. This one is called the Chasm of Doom. :)



No photos of scrambling, because you can't exactly carry a camera with you when you're climbing around inside a big pile of rocks. But it was AWESOME. I haven't had that much fun in a long time! I totally want to take the boys when they're just a few years older. They would love it.

Our plan was to camp out that first night. But when we set up the tent, we discovered that our pathetic tent stakes were no match for the rock hard ground. They simply folded in half when you pounded them.



It was windy, so we weighted our tent down and hoped for the best. But it turned out that there was a high wind advisory that night, so at around 10pm we found ourselves taking the tent back down (try doing that in a high wind!) throwing everything into the back of the van, and heading to a hotel for the night. It certainly wasn't the way we'd planned the evening, but it was an adventure and the hotel turned out to be really nice. :)

Here we are enjoying ourselves. It is hard to take non-blurry pictures when you're laughing and your camera is on the wrong setting.



At the end of our weekend we went to a little French restaurant for brunch. We went late and ended up having the entire restaurant to ourselves! Our waiter was a great blend of professional and personable. He took our picture for us: aren't we cute?



And I meant to take a picture of our lovely dessert, but you'll just have to take my word for how pretty it was. Yum.



It was a fabulous weekend and a great way to celebrate nine years of marriage. Here's to many, many more!