Our Story #1: The Anti-Valentine

{Part 1 of a 7-part series of stories about my journey of love, with Al by my side.}

You all should know by now the story of how we met. If not, go check-out the "Me, Him and Our Story" link above.

I'll be going in chronological order for this series, but I won't be starting quite at the beginning.

I'm fast-forwarding past our New Years' reunion (that story is here.)

I'm fast-forwarding past the big, family wedding I went to with him that same month.

(January 2009, Note: my short post-Navy haircut)

And I'm starting my story instead the following February of the same year.

Al and I had been re-acquainted for over 6 months now and after seeing each other a couple of times, it was clear that we wanted to see more of each other.

He was newly stationed in El Paso on Ft. Bliss and I was working for a law firm, living with my parents and looking for ANY excuse to do something fun.

So, we decided to go for it and plan a visit to Texas over Valentine's Day.

Between my work schedule and his training schedule, we kept it to a 4-day weekend. And honestly, neither of us really knew what to expect, so any more then that could have been a bad idea.

The plan (honestly, I SWEAR!) was to drive up to Austin, TX and check out the law school while I was there. That never happened.

He wasn't able to get a pass for the weekend, which means he was required to stay within 4 hours of post so he could return if called back.

Plus, it was a 10-hour drive to Austin and honestly, we weren't ready to spend that much time in a car together...yet.

So instead we drove out to Tuscon, AZ for the night. We had ZERO idea of what to do in Tuscon, so when we got to our cheap-y motel (not the hourly-rate kind of cheap, just a Days Inn kind of cheap) we grabbed a bunch of those tourist brochures from the front desk.

There were a couple of interesting-looking places we could have gone, but we were doing this trip "on the cheap" so we narrowed it down to the FREE ones.

Where we ran across this gem:

The old west "Trail Dust Town"

We saw this fun live western cowboy show and we ate a pretty nice meal at a steakhouse. We spent plenty of time walking around doing things like panning for gold and touring the gift shop. It was a fun, silly, spontaneous trip and after a good night sleep, we headed back to El Paso.

The next day we decided to meet up with some of his friends and climb the mountain. For those of you who don't know, El Paso is RIGHT on the border of Mexico and located at the base of the Franklin (and others) mountain range.

I got cocky and figured I could handle the climb with no problem. I'd been home from the Navy less than 6 months and I was still in pretty peak condition. So we set out.

Boy, was I foolish. That mountain kicked my ass. But I was NOT about to let him know that.

Despite my greatest efforts to disguise my ineptitude, Al totally noticed. Lucky for me, he wasn't disappointed. In fact, he kept telling me if I wanted to quit, he'd happily turned around and head back down to the car. He said that he wouldn't judge me if I wanted to quit.

The idea of quitting just killed me.

So instead, I pushed myself all the way to the top of that damn mountain.

(He told me later he knew exactly what he was doing and he knew I wouldn't quit. He knew that if he challenged me that I would do it just to prove him wrong.)

He was right, I'm that stubborn.

Our cars...all the way down there...

(I know I've said it before, but thank you babe, for pushing me!)

That night we checked into a new hotel - our nice two-room suite for Valentine's Day.

Now, something you should now is that we don't celebrate Valentine's Day.

We think it's a commercialized, fabricated and silly holiday that's meant to promote love when all it really does is promote spending money on junk we don't need. I don't want flowers and chocolates (and if you're going to give me, I want it on a random Tuesday for no real reason.) I want to encourage love in my relationship on a DAILY basis.

In an effort to avoid any standard Valentine's-esque celebration, we went to Wal-mart, bought a puzzle and picked up a bottle of wine. We ordered Toscani Pasta from Pizza Hut and stayed in. It was pretty darn perfect; it was very "us."

After dinner and some wine, we were curled up on the couch watching VH1 and reflecting on our weekend, since I would be leaving the next day.

(If you went back and looked at this story, you'll know where this is going...)

The irony of our lack of V-day support is that it became our anniversary weekend. We weren't "officially" together (who uses those stupid titles anyway?) when I left, but I think we both knew as we parted that neither of us wanted anything else. We wanted each other.

And after such an amazing weekend, we (mostly I, since I was the one of the fence) jumped in and tried the long distance thing.

And I'm so glad I did.

{Coming up in part 2: the first time we got dirty...he he}