My Anniversary Weekend

Hello, Hello, Helllllooooo... Hi! Hey, Y'all! So glad to see you! Thank you to everyone who has expressed an interest in my health and well-being. And, to those who'd wondered if I'd turned to poop and the hogs ate me. So, let me start by saying that I have not turned to feces and been eaten by the other white meat. Also, I am fine and dandy. I have just been extremely busy and my brain has been on overload - incapable of trying to string together coherent sentences that anyone would want to read on this little ol' blog of mine. Hopefully, now that homeschool group is done for the year, I'll be able to get back to blogging a little more regularly. Now that we've gotten that out of the way...

OK. So what in tarnation have I been up to exactly? Well, of course you know that I started a business this year and opened a shop on Etsy, PURE YANKABILLY - All Natural Skincare. That's where the majority of my brain cells have been recently. Y'all, there is a LOT of work that is involved in starting a business. It's not just making products, taking pictures and uploading them to Etsy. That's actually the smallest part of it. Who knew?... Anyway, Isaac is still homeschooled and we are part of a homeschool group. So, we've had that and several days of Stanford Testing. And, for some weird reason my family expects me to still feed them and make sure they have clean undies and all. You understand about that, right? In the midst of my new normal, though, we've tried to squeeze in a few fun thing, too. Today I'll share a bit about one of these mini trips with you.

Last month Chris and I celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary. In trying to think of something fun to do in honor of it, we decided to take a weekend trip to Columbus, OH where it all began for us. We wanted to take Isaac along and show him all of "our" special places - where we met, where we went to school, where we dated, our first apartment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The closer we got to the city and as that lovely skyline came into view, we got really excited. Well, Chris and I did anyway. Floods of old memories and the feelings that came with them started rolling in. Then, we came to the area that we once called home. To say that it had changed would be a colossal understatement. It had been really nice when we lived there. Now, not so much... Anyway, we checked into our hotel and began our expedition. Oh yeah, our hotel wasn't even there 17 years ago. Neither was the mini city that used to be cornfields surrounding it.

Y'all, it was CRAZY! CRAZY, I say! Our journey to 'us' began when we met at Meijers (a northern version Walmart, only nicer), where we both worked. We got off of work at 2 in the morning and the only place open at that time was the Waffle House that occupied the front of the Meijers parking lot. So, that was where we went every night when we got off work to drink tea and talk until we had to go get a few hours of shut-eye before school. People, they closed Meijers down! It was just an empty, dilapidated shell of a building! Then, they had torn down the Waffle House and built a new one in a different location of the same parking lot. So, even though there was still a Waffle House there - it wasn't "our" Waffle House. Bummer... After that disappointment, we decided to go see our first apartment that we lived in after we got married. It. had. changed. ALOT. It was a pretty new and pretty nice neighborhood back in the day. Now, though...well, let's just say that we were afraid to slow down to snap a picture of it.

 After that, I had Chris drive by my first apartment there. And, lo and behold, it hadn't been torn down or moved or changed into a new super center or anything.

I lived in the first floor apartment right there where the grill is. Ironically, the name of the apartment complex is "The Moors" and my new last name is also Moore. I think it was destiny. Yep. Lots of memories there. I lived there with 4 other girls. The people above us sounded like they moved the furniture at least a few nights a week to hold line dancing parties. Of course, we probably weren't much quieter. That apartment complex was more like a dorm and our place seemed to be a major hang-out. At least one thing about Columbus hadn't changed so far...

We moved on to see the old school. You guessed her... The old campus had been sold. It wasn't there anymore. The school had relocated and had changed names. See, I told you it was crazy. By this time it was getting late so we hit the Walmart that hadn't existed 17 years ago for drinks for the night, grabbed some take-out from the Popeye's that popped up out of nowhere and headed back to the hotel that used to just be a cornfield.

The next morning dawned with fresh hopes of finding and exploring the parks that we used to picnic at and walk the trails. We also thought we'd head out to Hocking Hills, which is only a short 40 minute drive away. But, alas, it was not to be. It was raining. Not that all out frog chokin' kind of rain - just the kind that was light enough to be a nuisance. We knew Hocking Hills would be a bad idea because you just really don't want to go walking trails high in the cliffs on wet rock. We figured we could still go find our old parks, though. But, you guessed it, we could not find them for the life of us. Everything was so built up and new roads and towns expanded to the point where nothing was recognizable. And, if it hadn't been for GPS we would have been totally lost.

On to Plan B. We decided to go find one of our favorite towns, Granville, OH. It's a beautiful little town nestled in the hills and home to Denison University.

We used to love to take the beautiful back roads and drive through those gorgeous hills, enjoying each other's company as well as the view. It was magical - especially during Autumn when the leaves were in peak color. It was also the place where this incident happened.

Although it was rainy, it was still beautiful. Here's a bit of it's charm - although there ain't nothing like the real thing, Baby.

brick roads

quaint churches

lovely houses

and this charming town full of incredibly cool restaurants and stores

like this one.

It's a very French-y type store

with darling vignettes every place you look.

Granville also has this hotel.

It's supposed to be haunted. We didn't go in to find out.

A brief trip through Granville was all we could handle. Not only was it still drizzling, it had gotten c.o.l.d. It looked like everything we had planned for our anniversary get-away and trip down memory lane had been doomed from the git-go. I didn't even mention how our original hotel reservations had fallen through when we were only about an hour away and our room ended up costing more for one night than our original reservations had been for 2. So, we decided that we would stop for a nice, warm lunch and head on back to home-sweet-home.

Although nothing went as we had envisioned for that weekend, all-in-all it was still nice to get away for the night. We also learned a good lesson. You can't relive the past. Time marches on whether we want it to or not. So, it was a good reminder to enjoy the memories of our lives just for what they are - good memories - and focus on making new ones. Which is exactly what that weekend ended up being. Now we can look back and say, "Hey, remember that time we went to Columbus to show Isaac all of our old places and our history and not one thing went right because everything had changed?"

Have you ever tried to take a trip down memory lane only to find it had turned into a super-highway?