Our two-year anniversary surprise!

If you have read our past entries in this blog then you will notice that we have been pretty busy lately. For this reason, I expected our two-year anniversary to be a small affair so we could keep up with all of our commitments. Well...I was wrong.

On Friday morning Rachel was driving me to work, like always, but instead of dropping me off she kept on driving. I thought she was kidnapping me so that I would go talk to her fourth graders about science (we had previously talked about this, and I had expressed my profound fear of fourth graders at that time). I wasn't too happy and I felt like I needed to be at work. Then she started talking about all kinds of wierd things:

"Logan," she said, "There are some things I can do by myself, and there are some things I cannot. For example," she continued, "I cannot lead a 5.10 climb. I need you for that. Also, I certainly can't find my way around Red Rocks without you, and I would be lonely in Zion without you there."

I slowly began to understand what was going on. She then told me to look under the seat. There was a paper with our reservations for a hotel along the Las Vegas strip. Also she told me that she had arranged with my work to get the next four days off for me, and she had gotten a substitute for her class. We were going on a vacation to Las Vegas and Zion!

On Friday we checked into our hotel then drove out to the Calico Hills area of Red Rocks to do some climbing. The sandstone was a nice change from the quartzite and granite that we were used to and we had a good afternoon doing short one-pitch climbs. The next day we headed out to First Creek Canyon and climbed around on Lota Balls Wall. This is one of the coolest walls I've climbed on because the rock looks like it has hundreds of marbles embeded in it. After climbing during the day, we spent the night wandering around the Strip looking at the various resort hotels and casinos. We finnished off the night by relaxing in the hotel spa and finally went to bed around 4:30 in the morning.

The next day we drove up to St. George to visit with Rachel's grandparents and catch up on our sleep. Monday, we went to Zion National Park and did a lot of hiking/trail-running. Before this trip I wasn't sure if we would get a chance to do Angel's Landing or Hidden Canyon again before the big move to Ohio. We did both of these hikes yesterday with perfect weather.

Now we are home and life is back to normal, but we had a great weekend/vacation/anniversary. Thank you Rachel for being so wonderful!