Weddingbee Blog

IN Photography

Over the weekend, Mr. Cookie and I celebrated our first anniversary! I can’t believe that a year has come and gone. It’s crazy how time flies when you are having fun. In honor of our anniversary, we decided to trek up to the Colorado high-country to see the amazing fall foliage.

We drove from Denver over Independence Pass and on to Aspen — making stops to take pictures along the way.

Me with my camera.

Mr. Cookie looking like his handsomely, devilish self.

Besides a few stops to take photos of the vibrancy of the aspens leaves — seriously, those leaves were majestic — our first major stop was Independence Ghost Town. Just over Independence Pass — which I’ll show you pictures of a little later in this post — the town was founded on the 4th of July in 1879 by prospectors looking for gold. By 1899, the town was abandoned after a terrible winter cut off food to the miners.

What remains today are a few of the miners’ cabins, the general store, and a marker that denotes where the boarding house used to stand. It was eerily cool. We were both in awe of the guts and determination it must have taken those miners to live there. Amazing.

We got back in the car and headed down the road to Aspen, but when we got there it was pouring rain — I mean pouring. We ducked into a local coffee shop and grabbed a mocha and hot chocolate, hoping to wait out the rain. We wanted to walk around the town, but after an hour and a half the rain had not subsided. We tried to brave the rain, but we were without an umbrella and soon drenched and cold. Bummed, we got into the car and made our way back over Independence Pass. Once we got there, we saw an amazing site…

The pass was completely clear when we had passed over it only two hour prior, but now the pass was covered with the first snow fall of the season. And like kids in a candy store, Mr. Cookie and I stuck out our tongues and started catching snowflakes in our mouths. It was colder than hell, frozen over, and beautiful all at the same time.

Our little excursion up to the mountains got me thinking. We had been looking forward to walking around Aspen; I have never been, and Mr. Cookie hadn’t been there in years. But we had so much fun on the car ride — looking at the amazing fall foliage, the ghost town, and seeing the first snow fall, and celebrating our first anniversary — that I was reminded that sometimes it’s not necessarily about the destination, but the journey that counts. Kinda like marriage, which I must say is one of the most amazing journeys I have ever been on. And I am so grateful to have a wonderful partner to share in it with.

When Mr. Cookie and I got home, we got out the remainder of our wedding cake from the freezer. We hadn’t intentionally planned on saving our wedding cake for our first anniversary, but we just never got around to eating the leftovers. Our first anniversary seemed apropos to finish the cake off. Amazingly, it preserved really well, and I dare say it tasted almost like it did on our wedding day. We washed the cake down with a bottle of wine that we bought in Paris they day Mr. Cookie proposed to me. Then, we popped in a movie and fell asleep snuggling on the couch. A perfect way to end our first anniversary.

How did you celebrate your first anniversary?