Silver Dollar Anniversary

On September 8th, Jeff and I celebrated 8 married years together.

We concluded that 8 years is a good amount. More than many make it, and we're still going strong. We told each other "I love you". Course we say that to each other every day, at least a dozen times.

That day, I woke up to roses and a card with Jeff's trademark swirly writing - I LOVE getting cards from Jeff. He's the master.

Later, we went out for dinner at Outback of all places and have since said we won't be back, maybe ever. We had a great time together, but the place just isn't worth the money.

Our REAL anniversary celebration was a week later when we went for our FIRST ever trip away from the kids. Seriously, we'd never both left them before overnight - or even for more than maybe 5 hours. We were excited yet wary. Not because we didn't think they'd have a great time, time spent with Mar-Mar and Aunt Katie is always time well spent, but because of how WE felt about leaving them.

I cried. I tried hard not to. But I did.

And then we set off to Silver Dollar City. We'd been saying for a LONG time that we wanted to go by ourselves and take the Lantern Tour in Marvel Cave. It's a special tour after the last tour of the day. You have to sign up and pay an extra fee, but you get to go in the cave with all the lights off with only the light of lanterns. There are different guides and they tell lots more stories than on the regular tour. Best of all, they take you into the Mammoth room - part of the cave you don't get to see on the regular tour. We were also anxious to see the bats, hopefully lots of them.
The tour didn't disappoint. But I was an idiot and didn't get a single picture, I was too excited I guess. We each got our own lantern and down we went. It was truly amazing to be in the cave without all the normal lights, somehow you felt like you were able to see even more. Then the guides started in on the ghost stories. Whew. I do NOT like spooky stuff, so this was ROUGH for me. My Dad could tell you about being in Edinburgh, Scotland and the family wanting to go on one of the many ghost tours they have there. I REFUSED to go. My Dad, who is a GOOD Dad, took me instead to see Jurrasic Park 2 while my Mom and brothers went on the tour.
Back to the cave. Even with the ghost stories, and there were a BUNCH of them, I still loved the tour. I've loved going into caves my whole life, and Marvel Cave is truly amazing. I very much wanted to see some bats, preferably hundreds of them just hanging out. This didn't happen, instead we saw maybe 5 that took flight once we'd enter a dark room with our lanterns. Still cool.

We watched sorghum being made, Jeff was in HEAVEN. I'm not joking here. He has been wanting to watch this for months. We were both shocked by how much juice is actually squeezed out of the reeds.


Having no kids with us gave us the chance to read every sign, go into every shop, and check every nook and cranny of one of our favorite places to be. And we seriously DID read every sign, went into every store and checked out every nook and cranny of SDC. It was awesome, but at the same time we kept saying "The kids would LOVE this."


OK, so I didn't get the best pictures ever. But without kids, you kind of forget to.


But we did get a video of us dancing a jig. Enjoy.