It's Our 20th Wedding Anniversary!

We celebrated our 20th anniversary our way...

First, we found a dozen white roses, while we were out looking for a FTF (First To Find) geocache. Maybe I'll tell you the complete story about that sometime...

Then, we went to a Brazilian restaurant for Churasco Gaucho-Style barbecue. It was something we had never tried before with lots of different kinds of meat on skewers. Simply awesome...

After that, we drove out to Highway 60 to watch the sun go down. We saw 6 porpoises playing in the water, a bunch of little crabs climbing all over the pine tree in the picture and all kinds of birds. Oh, and a boat just happened to zip by as we took the picture.

The sun finally set, so it was time to go home.

So we took a quick group photo and headed home for some ice cream and a couple of eposiodes of "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century". Nothing like a nice, peaceful evening to say "Thanks For Still Being There".

It's been a great run so far, with humble beginnings to boot.

A Little History:

We met on a Sunday night at a movie theatre of all things, and the main reason I was there was simply because I was cheap (Protocol & Starman - a double-feature at the dollar cinema, how cool is that?). She was there with her family and I was there with my neighbor Scott from our house-turned-apartment-building. I was mainly trying to find things to do to wear out Scott, because I discovered that if I didn't tire out that loony-bird, I would never get any sleep at all as he tended to sing Elvis tunes (quite loudly) all night long.

Anyway, after the movies were over, somehow Luann and I managed to scratch together enough courage to exchange phone numbers and we made sure we didn't lose touch. Our first date was to take a hike up the Superstition Mountain by way of "Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch", which is something of a rustic resort and gateway to the hiking trails. We just hiked up a trail and sat on a boulder which overlooked the valley and talked about life for a while.

Somehow, we just 'clicked' and we found that we worked pretty well together, even though we had an occasional argument over mundane things such as a Rug Doctor carpet cleaner and even stormed off from my car on the Rickenbacker Causeway in Miami once like the North and South facing Zax's in a Dr. Suess story. Somehow, we would always figure out how to settle our differences and adjust so that we didn't hit that speedbump and argue all over again...

We have been around, and have traveled far. We've even been to Europe, for example. Holland to be exact. And we hadn't even thought about going there until we met up with Wicher and Sonja Nieborg on the internet. We had a great time (even after the tumble down the spiral staircase Luann took) and we couldn't have had better people with such open hearts to host us for our visit to Holland.

We even figured out that a true test of companionship is to take a long cross-country drive. We did that several times, including the harrowing drive through a hurricane as we brought home our new car from Hickory, North Carolina. You find out real fast if the person you're traveling with is somebody you can't deal with, or if you both start dividing up the tasks during the journey to ensure everybody will get there in one piece. We have probably driven 100 thousand miles together on big roadtrips. We even drove from Miami, FL to Phoenix, AZ for our wedding, then hauled a trailer back with us. We had to hurry so much (or I would lose my job), that we didn't even have a chance for a proper honeymoon. So, we keep looking for little hidey-holes to spend a couple of days and just relax together. Like Freeport in the Bahamas, or a cruise to the Caribbean, or a weekend in Savannah, Georgia, or even a week in Mebane, North Carolina to sort of make up for 'lost time'.

As we have been together, we have expanded our horizons. From my being a rental yard mechanic to becoming an insurance agent to being an electrical engineer and Luann starting out as a clerk at an animal feed-grain facility, then joining the Army, to eventually working her way into the computer sector as a tech /engineer.

Our interests have also changed, what with being interested in target shooting, stock car racing, drag racing, long distance bicycling, sailboating and now, geocaching. As you might see, each of these hobbys feeds our competitive nature and gives us ways to try for that little bit more in life. I guess you can say we duke it out on the field of competition rather than at home, which is a good plan.

So, here we are. 20 years have gone by (not including the 2 years+ of dating, or perhaps you could say, practicing to be married) and we are no longer anything like we were before. The initial roaring fires of passion have died down to the embers of comfort and warmth. Which is not a bad thing, if you find that you now prefer to snuggle up in front of the fireplace and not get burned. Not a bad thing at all...

Thanks for for still being there, "Mouse".

A Little Bit Of Sailing

Of course, since the In-Laws were in town, we just had to take the sailboat out for the day. So we headed out to do some fishing from the sailboat on Old Tampa Bay. For some reason, Poppa kept trying to convince me that we should try troll-fishing behind the sailboat. Thankfully, he was overuled by the Mrs., so we didn't have to do it. We did anchor off of a radar reflector marker and tried our luck at this first location. We had little activity and we watched a guy on another boat nearby hook into a cobia that looked to be sizable, but it got away from him.

Unfortunately, with the couple of places we tried to find fish, we just didn't have good luck.

The only fish we brought on-board was this cute little Bonnet-Head Shark. He was all of about 16 inches long. We unhooked him and sent him on his way. Since we couldn't bring home some fish for dinner, we decided to go to Crabby Bill's restaurant and eat some seafood that sombody else had caught.

Unfortunately, we spent a bit more time on the water than we usually do and the 3 of us received pretty bad sunburns, while the In-Laws (wisely) stayed under the bimini top and didn't fare as poorly as we did. Today, we're spending time indoors, 'nursing our wounds', so to speak.

4th Of July Celebration

We decided that we would visit the Florida Aquarium , then watch the fireworks put on by the Channelside area. After we left the aquarium, we walked back to to the parking garage and decided to wait for the show to begin.

This picture shows the Florida Aquarium to the left and the Channelside area where the fireworks will begin directly in front of us.And here we are, sitting by the railing on the 6th floor landing waiting for the show.The fireworks were spectacular, as many were that night (we could see the fireworks displays of several other cities going on before and after the Channelside display.Well, Time to head home

Letterboxing

We decided to try something called Letterboxing (http://www.letterboxing.org/ or http://www.atlasquest.com/). This involves swapping rubber ink-stamp impressions with others in the area by first finding the hidden location using various written clues (kind of like geocaching, but without the GPS). We have found 2 of them so far.

This letterbox had a hand-carved stamp in it depicting a jokey on a race horse at the Tampa Bay Downs race track. Very neat.

This search took us on a winding route for about a mile before we finally got to the site where the letterbox was hidden.

Our stamp image is on the left, which is the logbook that was in the letterbox, and we placed an impression of the fish in our logbook.

And this is why the letterbox was placed here. It's right on the edge of the waterfront and positioned under a huge pine tree. A nice and peaceful spot to sit and reflect on life for a bit.

300th Find

Well, we did it. We found 300 geocaches so far and number 300 was done in a special way. As luck would have it, the morning of July 4th, I was working on the computer and I received a notification that a new geocache near our house was freshly 'minted'. Since we know other cachers in the area have a competitive spirit regarding FTF (First To Find) status on new caches, we knew we had to move quickly in order to have our 300th find logged as an FTF. Long story short, we got out there and within 10 minutes we were joined by another cacher that we knew. As we continued searching, the new cache-owners came up to cheer on the competition. Thankfully, Luann found it and we were allowed to claim an FTF for our 300th geocache find.
Due to the nature of the hide, the cache-owners didnt want me to post a 'spoiler' picture of the cache itself, so here is a picture I took of the monument while we were in the Veteran's Memorial Park.

Summer Visit

The Andersons have come down for a visit and we took them out geocaching! (Of course)

Here we are, starting off on our first hunt in a butterfly garden.

And waddaya know? Poppa came over and asked me to inspect this strange-looking Florida bug, since he had never seen one quite like it before. Welcome to Geocaching!

The next one we were searching for was suspended high up in a tree. Bingo! Poppa found that one too.

Alright, alright. I'll get it...

This geocache had a clue of "Old Man & The Tree". Any idea what that could mean?

And where would the container be hiding? Behind his nose, of course!

Afterwards, they decided to take on some caches that we hid, which we call our Dragon's Run Series. After reading the hint that says: Stay WITHIN the fence line, DR-1, the cinnamon spice bottle inside the fencepost, was found pretty quickly.

DR-2 put up more of a fight, but eventually, they found it.

DR-3 was a little tricky, until they figured out that a tree branch could be hollowed out and a container put inside it. This was good training for them to go looking for our big geocache, 1 Fish, 2 Fish, I fish, U Fish. Well, so much for our caches, time to hunt some other peoples' caches again.

This hide here was very difficult, it turned out to be spice bottle with a beautiful geocoin hidden in it. That made it worth the 40-minute hunting time for this one.

This cache is called "Old Lump" and Katrina was the brave soul that located it. There was a nice geocoin in this one too.

So far, we've been having fun with these things and as of this writing, we have found 299 caches. Now, where do we go that is special for our 300th find?