20th in Venice

20 years ago Matt and I spent 10 days on the West Coast enjoying our honeymoon. San Francisco was amazing! We loved the weather and knew we’d like to go back someday. When we had our photos developed at Wal-mart (send-out, not one-hour because we had 300+ pictures to develop) we were crushed to find that only about 10 had come out clear. The new-fangled camera I had (a style of camera that lasted only a handful of years) had a non-replaceable battery in the zoom thingy and every photo that I used the zoom feature was blurry.

The lady at the photo counter felt so bad for me she ran the entire batch through the 1-hour machine just to double-check that the problem was the actual photos and not the machine they had been run on.

Nope. 290 ruined photos. 10 were good. I cried. And you better believe that before I had babies I upgraded to an SLR camera. (DSLRs weren’t out at that point or if they were, they weren’t in my price range.)

Because of my heart-break and for a graduation present, my parents helped us go back to San Francisco for our 1-year anniversary. I took my pitiful honeymoon photo album, which I had created with the blurry pictures, along on the trip and we recreated as many of the pictures as we could. I then made a side-by-side album which I still treasure.

Most of our anniversaries have been celebrated with low-key activities. One year, after his 15-month deployment, we took a cruise. It was a great time celebrating our 10^th Anniversary and was the longest we had ever been away from our boys (there were three at the time). It was also our first-ever debt-free vacation! The cruise was memorable for many reasons, the top three reasons being that it followed such a long separation, that it was paid in cash before we left, and finally, because we learned something about ourselves: we aren’t really the cruise-going kind of people. Our package included two vouchers we could spend on anything on board. After one visit to the spa where we found could finally relax, far away from the swarms of people and non-stop loud-speaker announcements, we sank our entire vouchers (and then some) on the week-pass to the spa. We read by the windows that overlooked the very back of the ship, sipped water with fresh orange slices, and relaxed in the Japanese jacuzzi.

During our tour in Wiesbaden we took a family trip to Italy, with Venice being the finale. It was a magical place and we vowed that we’d make it back some day, without kids. We started saying that we’d shoot for our 20^th, not knowing if that would be feasible. Who knew where in the world we’d be living when we hit that milestone?!? Well, as it turns out we are in Stuttgart, Germany, a 1-hour flight from that magical city, so we simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make our dream a reality.

In this series I’ll post about our fun, some tips I have for those heading to Venice, and, most importantly, share the pictures I took that I’m simply thrilled to say I took {mostly} all by myself.

My sweet husband made my dream of celebrating our 20^th in Venice a reality. I’m sure there were other cities he would have liked ot check off our bucket list, but this was a special trip to celebrate us. We decided that revisiting a city we’d been to before would help us relax and just “be” there… we wouldn’t be worried about seeing all of the things because we’d seen them before. Getting lost in Venice is sort of what you’re supposed to do, and without kids, we were able to do that multiple times a day… on purpose (with anyone whining that they were tired, hot, hungry, or needing a Wi-Fi fix)!

I hope you enjoy reading along as I share our Venetian Adventures! I’m looking forward to re-living them as I write!