An Anniversary Excursion

Life is busy enough that sometimes you have to celebrate special occasions on days other than the actual day.  We've done that occasionally for birthdays.  Anniversaries are another good example.  The day of our anniversary is actually Monday but there isn't enough time on a week day to do what we wanted so we took off yesterday, a Saturday, and had some fun for our anniversary. We decided to go see a couple of places on our sight-seeing list.

There's a park that has been on our list for a while because it has a swinging bridge we wanted to go see.  Swinging bridges are cool, they bounce when you walk on them.  We had stopped to see one a couple of years ago while on temple trip.  Unfortunately, it never occurred to us this time that the park might be closed for the winter.  Alas, it was.  But that just meant instead of being able drive to a parking lot nearby we had to walk a ways into the park.

So we did.  Being a nice, sunny day, the walk was kind of nice.  For the most part, the road was clear and open so it was also an easy walk.  At least, easier than the walk we made a little later in the day.  But we'll get to that in a minute. 

The bridge we wanted to see is on one end of the park, as opposed to out in the middle.  Its not a real big park anyway.  Nonetheless, we got so see some really nice scenery while hiking to and through the park to the bridge.

The river that runs through the park (after all, if there's a bridge there must be a river, right?) was beginning to thaw but there was still plenty of snow around.  Kind of pretty.

There was just the earliest beginnings of green starting to stir around the park.  The green pine trees don't count - they stay green all winter.  But in the grass that had made it out from under the snow there were green shoots pushing up all over the place.

There is actually more than just the swinging bridge in the park. 

But it was the swinging bridge that we wanted to see.  This one was actually a bit longer than the one we visited a couple of years back.  It isn't a picturesque as the other, but its still a nice place.  We decided we might have to come back after the park greened up a bit.

And, of course, being a bouncy swinging bridge, we had to jump on it. The first jump wasn't very big and didn't do much.

The second jump, however, was a bit better.  But in either case, the jumping took place over the solid end of the bridge and didn't cause the bridge to swing very much.  After all, there was a sign right there that warned against making the bridge swing.  Actually, to get it to bounce all you had to do was walk on it.  Just walking across it made it bonce so much that I found myself hanging on to the rail.

We also spent a little time looking around the area right around the bridge, including a stone bridge not too far away. A nice place.

Then it was on the road, off to the next stop.  Along the way we passed a farm with their silo painted in an unusual manner.  We had to stop and take a picture; pretty interesting.

The next stop was lunch at a little cafe in a small, rural town.  We'd never been there before, it was one I had just found and thought we'd give it a try.  That's a hit or miss kind of thing.  Sometimes these small town cafes are really good, other times there just so so. 

This one was small, there was only us and a couple of other diners at a table across the room.

But it was a cozy little place.  And the food was pretty good, too.

Brombeere had creamy potato soup and a caeser chicken wrap that she said was pretty good.

I had something else.

When we go to these little out of the way places I look over the menu but if I see they have a Ruben sandwich that's usually about as far as I look.  I love those things.  So I got the sandwich, which came with a salad as well.

Not a bad lunch at all.

The next stop was out in the middle of nowhere.  The nowhere part was coincidence, the middle part was quite specific.

This is known as the 45x90 spot.  The midpoint of the northern half of the western hemisphere.  How would it be to own the spot of land where that point fell?  The county has made a small park at that point.  There's a small parking area just off the road where you can stop and look at the sign they've put up. 

But the actual 45x90 point is about 100-150 yards to the east, out in some farmer's field.  I'm not aware of the deal the county and the farmer have reached but there is the parking area, a marker out in the field, and a path across the top of the field from the parking area to the marker.  I hadn't expected anything to be there except the parking area.  But there is, even though it all looks like its pretty new.  The signage looked temporary and the wood was new and unweathered.  It takes a chunk out of the guy's field that he has to plow and harvest around.  But it must be a workable arrangement because there it is.

This little hike was actually harder than the hike into the park.  That is because the path was never cleared all winter.  Its a crushed granite path and had probably as much as 8 or 10 inches of snow on it in most places.  Others spots it had melted away down to the granite.  But most of the way it was snow covered.

That made it pretty wet on this day, too, because it was above freezing so the snow was melting.  But we made it.  This is looking back across the field to the parking area.  Looks like the field was planted in corn last year.

I think the county must have refurbished the whole "park" in the last year.  The marker used to be a small little marker set in cement in the ground.  Now its a big marker with a nice metal plate in the center.  It reminded me of our stop at the Four Corners monument where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah come together.  But this wasn't as commercialized as that.  This was much nicer in that regard. I had kind of expected that we would be alone there but there were several other people leaving as we arrived.  A few more came and were out at the marker with us.  In fact, we took their picture on their camera and they took ours on ours.  That was nice.  There were also lots and lots of foot prints in the snow on the path, too.  One lady, who was coming back as we went out, stopped to rest on a nice bench about halfway to the marker.  She had a walking cast on her foot.

There was a sign at the marker showing where all the 45x90 spots are.  Two are out in the ocean, one is in China, and there other is here in our state.

We didn't get to do this at Four Corners.  The day we were there, during the summer months a few years ago, there was line to stand on that marker that was probably 45-60 minutes long.  We didn't wait.

After visiting the marker out in the field you can go into town and get a medallion and be an official member of the 45x90 club. So, of course, we did.

  

Then we topped the excursion off with a stop at our favorite ice cream place.  The perfect ending to a perfect day.  Its kind of nice to have reached this milestone and still have the perfect someone to spend such a day with, to have such an occasion to celebrate with.  She remains my favorite person.  I don't see that ever changing.