Well we made it - 50 years together. For our golden anniversary, we drove up to Loveland, Colorado to buy a love lock. Love locks are supposed to symbolize love and commitment (I'd say staying together for 50 years is quite a commitment), and Loveland is supposedly known as the Sweetheart City... at least according to their Chamber of Commerce.
Way back on my 60th birthday, I attached a love lock to the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris. But since that time, engineers have decided that adding all that weight to bridges tends to compromise them (those locks are heavy), so in Loveland, you're supposed to attach the love lock to a public art sculpture (there are 3 of them). We picked the LOVE sculpture, mostly because it was right off the interstate as you come into town. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the "O" had the most locks attached to it, probably because it's shaped like a heart. I managed to squeeze our lock in and take these pictures.
But after walking around the grounds for a while, I ended up going back to the sculpture and removing the lock to bring it home. I think I'd rather look at it once in a while than just think about it being up in Loveland.
So, after that little adventure, we drove down the highway and went hiking at Devil's Backbone. The trail isn't as rigorous as the name implies, but the day turned out to be really, really hot. Every time we stopped to take a break, Charlie tried crawling under the benches to get a little cooler. At least we had a nice breeze most of the day.
We planned to spend the night at a little cabin in Estes Park. The cabin was just outside Rocky Mountain National Park, so we took a short drive through there in the late afternoon. It turned out to be perfect timing, because we saw lots of wildlife. Luckily there weren't very many tourists at that time of day, because the ones that were there were stopping in the middle of the road, jumping out of their cars, and running after the sheep to take photos. I was afraid they were going to scare them all away.
