Our Fifth Anniversary

Yesterday Sydney and I celebrated five years of marriage.  A lot has happened since we were married the summer after college, including our first post-college apartment and car, learning to cook, five years of graduate school, a great deal of hiking and gardening, a daughter, and another child on the way.  Our recent months have been somewhat grueling (visa applications get sent in this week! Katherine’s on another round of teething!), and we decided we could really use a bit of time away from it all to relax.  Sydney’s mom, Dora, very kindly took Katherine from Saturday afternoon until late Sunday evening, leaving us free to run off for the weekend.

First we drove to Halifax and loaded up on food at a specialty grocery: guacamole, salsa, cranberry salsa, and chips; apricots, tangerines, papaya, and dates; baklava and fudge; smoked gouda, Irish cheddar with porter beer, and olive bread.  We’d planned to go out for dinner, but Sydney was taking me to a rather rural location and there weren’t a lot of restaurants around (especially for non-seafood folk).  Instead, we ate at the cabin Sydney rented on the northern coast of Nova Scotia, where we had a view like this:

Then we took a walk on the beach below those yellow chairs and enjoyed a sunset that looked like this:

Really lovely.  Of course, rather than sit and enjoy the romantic sunset we were busy exclaiming over the crabs that were trying to eat each other.  But that was quite fun.

Today we enjoyed sleeping in (no child waking us at 7:00!) and then took a leisurely hike through what Sydney had warned me might be swamp.  I, forgetting to bring my sneakers, was walking in dress sandals.  But when we arrived at the place we discovered that the majority of our walk would look like this:

The birch trees chaperoned us for more than a mile.

After a really lovely lunch at a cafe in one of the cute harbour towns we took another hike and then headed home.  We have plenty of grand excursions ahead of us, and we were glad for a relaxed, happy weekend that needed little planning and that rewarded us with quiet, mild exercise, and lots of good food.

Erin