Four Years Of Marriage & An Upstate Adventure

Last Wednesday, Daniel and I celebrated our four year wedding anniversary. FOUR YEARS, folks. FOUR. That's a solid chunk of time. I mean, have you met a four-year-old before? Those things can talk and walk and count to ten and sing every verse of "You Are My Sunshine." Take any four-year-old child born on August 19, 2011, and that's basically the human embodiment of our marriage. We are growing up so fast!

To celebrate this huge achievement of still liking each other, we did the thing we love to do. We went north. 

To upstate New York, of course. Ah, upstate New York, why are you so beautiful? Why are your antique shops so cute and your people so nice and your mountains so majestic? And why is your real estate so tantalizingly reasonable, so much so that I allow myself to fantasize about buying a house in one of your charming little towns and opening a bed & breakfast even though I am not particularly hospitable and I don't like strangers in my home?

Needless to say, we love going upstate. Over the years, cabin trips have sort of become our thing. We do them maybe more than we should, or maybe we don't do them enough, I can't decide. When we travel upstate (usually just 2 hours north to the Catskills Mountains), I become a different person. I am Catskill Christy, if you will. Catskill Christy doesn't wear a stitch of makeup. She eats a lot of cheese and drinks a lot of red wine. She can't stop singing Dixie Chicks songs, particularly the song "Wide Open Spaces." She only briefly logs onto Instagram to post a picture of a river or something, but then after that, she turns her phone on airplane mode and is totally engaged in the world around her. Once an hour, she looks at a mountain and she sighs and says something like, "Just look at this place. God is so good," and then she eats more cheese. Catskill Christy eats so much GD cheese.

Also, ice cream.

On this particular occasion, Catskill Christy and Daniel (he's the same good-natured person wherever he goes, so he doesn't need a Catskill persona) went to a little town called Narrowsburg. Back in November, we traveled to this very same place for Thanksgiving. Since we drove up during a terrifying blizzard, we remember that trip as the time we narrowly cheated death. I'll never forget driving up a hill of ice, certain that I was about to meet Jesus. Honestly, though, our near-death experience was totally worth it because THIS is what greeted us upon our arrival:

Meet The Cutest Little House in Narrowsburg (it's actual title on Airbnb). We loved our stay at this place so much that we agreed we would have to come back and see what it was like in the summer. We'd heard there was a swimming hole nearby, and given the fact that neither of us could even picture what a swimming hole was (we assumed it was a hole filled with water, but how deep? how wide? how many snakes?), we figured we'd need to see it for ourselves. For the record, in the summer, The Cutest Little House in Narrowsburg looks like this:

I've got a hunch it's cute in any season.

While in Narrowsburg, we did some antiquing and for a moment I genuinely considered creating an Instagram store with all of my favorite vintage clothing and oddities (jk lol no but srsly would you buy things from me? I have good taste maybeeeee).

We also did some mountain-hiking, some river-splashing, some steak-cooking, some fire sitting-bying, some premixed margarita-drinking, a hefty amount of cheese-eating, and some boggle-playing (and for me, specifically, some boggle-dominating).

On our way back home, we stopped at Storm King Art Center, which is a huge -- no, I mean, HUGE -- sculpture park. Actually, scrap whatever mental image you've conjured up after hearing the words "huge sculpture park" because I promise you it's not good enough, and just feast your eyeballs on all of THIS:

Seriously, Storm King had me at hello. While we were there, I actually discovered that I had a TICK on my arm, sucking all of the life force out of me, and even so I still could not stop feeling like the luckiest kid in the world (We removed the tick. Everything is fine). I can't wait to return to take pictures that don't include my frightening tan lines. 

While I love so many things about these little getaways, the best part by far is getting to spend them with my favorite travel buddy, Daniel. Did I mention he and I have been married for four years? Well, we have, and they've been four of the coolest years I could imagine, full of adventure and friendship and laughter.

Four years ago, before we got married, I remember mentally preparing for hard times. It's what a lot of well-intentioned people warn you about as you enter into marriage. And sure, those times creep up every once in a while because life is life and life is tough. But honestly, at it's best, I think marriage can just be easy. It's something I feel like Daniel has always understood. When he proposed to me, I remember very little about what he actually said because, well, my brain was exploding, but one thing I do remember him saying was this: "I can't wait to sing in the car with you for the rest of my life." On these trips upstate, that's exactly what we do. We crank up some 90s country music, we sing, we laugh, we eat chips. Easy. 

So here's to vacations, A+ husbands, and easy, easy love!

Four more years! Four more years!