the first ten years

 

 Celebrating our first decade together, Clay and I traipsed down to Eureka Springs, Arkansas for a rare weekend alone! 

(So thankful for family that will take on our gaggle for a couple days.)

It was a wonderful, restful, recharging, memory-making, happy weekend together. All that we were hoping for. Filled with little things like

* Pouring over scrapbooks from our beginning years. Such fun memories, but also making us grateful to remember what we have now. How things have grown and matured and the good fruit that every year brings us. We have much to be thankful for!

* Savory Italian food at Ermilio's on our actual anniversary night and a cute rock cottage to stay in for the weekend.

* Mouth-watering breakfast provided by our B&B hosts.

* Gentle morning rain to wander in while exploring old historic stone buildings and beautifully landscaped gardens. 

* Live banjo music as we drive with windows down through the historic loop, filled with quaint gift shops and fellow sight-seers.

* Behemoth catfish sandwiches and oldies for lunch, sitting outside and taking in a great view.

* Winding around steep Ozarkian back roads, searching for Clay's ancestral home buried in the Arkansas mountains.

The old Allred family farm.

* Visiting the gorgeous old general store & post office where Clay's great-grandpa (and his name-sake: Nuborn Clay) used to work as a mailman. Taking in the beauty of the handcrafted pottery that now fills the shelves, and finding familiar family names still on the old post office cubby holes.

 

 

 

* Ending our day's adventures with our favorites: salami & cheese, strong ginger beer, and blood orange caramel chocolate paired with a plush bed, candles and a BBC movie.

* Singing old praise songs from our college days at the famous Thorncrown Chapel while watching the beauty of rain falling in the woods all around us.

* Hiking around the hatchery and spring at Roaring River State Park in the middle of a Missouri thunderstorm. 

 

* Drying out at a local Mexican restaurant with burritos, jarritos & fried ice cream.

* Being welcomed by a toddler laughing at the top of her lungs as she runs toward us across the backyard.

Since every year seems to get better (though each with its own unique challenges), our love growing richer and deeper with God's good grace, I can't wait to see what the next decades have in store for us.