Sunnin' In the City: Happy 10 Year Anniversary!!!

Well, I'm a little delayed in posting this, as Dave and my 10 year wedding anniversary was actually back in June. However, I'm doing it now...trying to get up to date, and I'm getting closer with every post. Everyone knows what Dave's gift to me was (getting my children's book illustrated and published), but not many know what I did for Dave.

Well, I wanted to recreate the day we got engaged, but with a twist, so I surprised Dave by taking the day off, packing the car full of goodies and dropping the kids off at their grandparent's house for the day. I then gave Dave a gift that would lead us to our next adventure...sort of. I bought him a new GPS for hiking and backpacking, but one that could do geocaching. I thought that we could search for geo cache on our hike (where we got engaged) and then leave our own. Little did I know that you have to subscribe to a service and have downloaded the geocache information FIRST. I didn't do this ultra important step as I didn't want to open the new GPS as Dave likes to open new things himself, and I wasn't sure if he would like the GPS I got him.

Thankfully, he did like the GPS, but we had to drive back to Lance's house to use their computer so that we could download information about Geocaching and ones that would be around the trail we were going to hike. We tried the geocaching, but since I hadn't planned ahead and paid for the service we got virtually no clues, and it was QUITE hard, so we just took a trip down memory lane and recreated our steps during our hike that lead to our engagement over 10 years ago.

Dave searching geocache locations

Now that we have downloaded them, we need to find them using the GPS

We saw a lot of interesting things such as salamanders, butterflies, LOADS of ladybugs, and other critters. The path along the hike was pretty but a lot has changed. They had a lot of these little cottages everywhere...with people IN them. So many that it felt like we were imposing on them, rather than escaping the concrete jungle and becoming one with nature. It was kind of sad to see how much it has changed in 10 short years.

There were SO many salamanders...here is one of them :p

and an abnormal amount of ladybugs...this is just a select few of them

Loads of these little houses popped up

Food for thought...

If you don't look at the little cottages, the view is still pretty

Once we arrived to the waterfall where Dave originally proposed, I took out the sparkling apple cider and lunch and snacks that I had packed so that we can sit by the waterfall and enjoy some time together. Time together was not to be as it seemed that EVERYONE had the same idea to come sit at the waterfall. The longer we were there the more and more people came, so we finally decided to leave the trail and move onto our next adventure.

Dave with the Apple cider

This is the site of where we got engaged over 10 years ago

Pretty eh? :P

After our hike, we moved on to the LA Arboretum. It was really pretty there, but a bit pricey for what it was. They were shooting some video or something there...of course, only in LA right? We hung out for a little while, then went out to dinner and then headed over to our final outing of the night.

There's a bird in there...can you find it?

This was unique and I was quite fascinated with this HUGE birds nest exhibit

So I took a few pictures with it

And then some peaceful shots

There were peacocks everywhere

and one even showed me his pretty feathers

Dave by a waterfall

This is the location where the film crew was

We drove to the Griffith Observatory. It had been many years since I had been and I was bummed to learn that they had taken away this laser light show that I was so impressed with. I mean, that was one of the MAIN reasons that I took Dave there (he hadn't seen it), and I wanted him to. We hung around until we saw the sun set, and then drove back to pick up the kids and go home.