Year One: Success

Saturday the 7th was our anniversary.  It's hard to believe that we've been married for a year.  But it was a pretty good year with some nice changes and events.  We got to celebrate Christmas with both our families, on opposites on the country, Zak's 21st birthday, my 22nd, my graduation from BYU-Idaho in April, our move to Moscow, and our first summer vacation to California with my family.  We have loved every minute of it, the good and the bad, and we both think we're doing a pretty good job at this whole 'being married' thing.

So to celebrate we decided to leave Friday afternoon and spend the night in Spokane, and then Saturday there.  We found a cool hotel called the Hotel Ruby to stay in.  It was right in the heart of downtown Spokane (complete with all of their one-way streets, that we had no idea about...), and seemed like it had been recently bought and refurnished.

our room

our view of the train from the room

We walked around after we checked in, looking some of the restaurants, and tried to decide where to eat.  We finally ended up going to a place I had heard good things about, the Steam Plant Grill.  It had originally been a steam plant to provide steam heat & electrical power to Spokane, and did so for about 70 years, until it was no longer economically feasible in the 1980s.  Then it was bought by some people and turned into a really neat restaurant, with most of its original features still intact.

hamming it up

less than perfect picture of our view from our table

walking back to our hotel, which was down a few blocks

Anyways, it was a great choice for dinner, because everything we had was absolutely delicious.  Zak had great fish & chips, and I had heavenly cheese raviolis with basil, shallots, a cream sauce on top of a tomato herb sauce.  I devoured the entire plate, because I haven't had such good raviolis in a long time.  Yum!  For dessert, we split a slice of huckleberry ice cream pie (the Northwest region we live in is crazy about huckleberry, but we don't mind).  Everything was perfect!

yum!

heaven

he was actually that excited, haha

The next morning we got up to a beautiful day and went to the Riverfront Park we had looked up online a few weeks before.   I thought it would be a fun thing to explore, since it was our first trip to Spokane.  We had a really fun time, and the weather was perfect.  We rode on the cool skyride thing, which took us on a lovely tour of the Spokane Falls.

on the skyride

in our gondola

Spokane Falls

We then went to the Imax theater to watch a really cool movie about the Hubble space telescope.  After that, we played a few rounds of mini golf, which Zak mostly dominated, with his three hole-in-one shots.  I got one hole-in-one, on the last hole on our last round!  We had a nice lunch and walked over to the famous Looff Carrousel, which has been around since 1909.  After a little bit more of walking around, we headed back home and had a nice night relaxing and watching a movie.

'be more excited!'-Zak

being more excited with my horse

I don't want to forget to acknowledge my anniversary gift from my wonderful husband.  Zak got me a beautiful 1/4 carat diamond necklace.  Ever since he bought me my beautiful diamond earrings for Christmas, when I would wear them, I'd say it's my '21 Diamond Day'.  So now when I wear all my diamonds, it's my 22 Diamond Day.  So I have as many diamonds as I am old.  For a few months, anyways.  Zak is a very thoughtful and great husband, who may spoil me a little more than I deserve.  Part of his reasoning is that he's going to get me jewelry while he's in the job field for it, with the discounts, etc.  He jokes that when we're old, he'll have gotten me all of the jewelry, so then he'll get me, what, sweaters?  Anyways, I love my necklace, and wear it a lot. :)

Zak's present was a Citizen watch he picked out months ago.  He even had it transferred in from another store so he could wear it at work before we officially bought it.  He is very happy with it, and wears it all day.  I also got him, what I think, is a fun take on the traditional 'first paper' gift: a year subscription to National Geographic.  He was surprised and is excited to have something interesting to read (and so am I).

So it was a great anniversary, sorry it took a bit to post this.  I wanted to have all of the corresponding pictures to go along with the words, so here you go.