My husband and I are about to celebrate being married for 20 years

We met in August of 2001, and I think I knew within 3 weeks if he asked me to marry him I would say yes. The connection was that deep and strong. On my birthday on February 11 of 2002 he asked me to marry him. I said yes and we went on with out lives. I figured we would start planning our wedding in the future.

I Love this photo of him and I, it was the first professional photo we ever took together

What I didn't know

Is after I said yes I would marry him, he went and had a ring commissioned to be made. The day it was finished he came home from work at lunch to ask me to marry him again. I told him I said yes I would and I meant it, and he said no, I mean will you marry me today, and I without hesitation said yes. So he told me to be ready at 2:30 when he got off work as we had a lot to do.

Our first picture professionally done as husband and wife

We eloped that day

In the preachers living room that lived behind my parents house. With his best friend Jeff and my best friend @charisma777 as our witnesses. A few weeks later when I had a break from school we went on our honeymoon. And have been busy living life and raising kids. I came with 3 children to the marriage and my husband has been a wonderful partner in raising them.

We have gone on a few over night trips

And we use to take the kids on a weekend trip to amusement parks when they were growing up, but we didn't have a bunch extra for a real vacation. The last real vacation my husband and I went on was 20 years ago when we got married and went on our honeymoon. But now we are in a place where we can afford to travel, and have decided that we are going to go on a road trip across America over a 10 to 11 day period.

A recent picture of us, if I look a little sad in this photo I am we exchanged Christmas gifts but my dad had recently died and I had been crying for days

Planning the road trip

So we are hitting the road. We know we want to hit Crater Diamond Park in Arkansas, on the way to or from the Grand Canyon, maybe we might hit that park twice once on the way and on the way back home. But I also want to visit Zion National Park and Arches in Utah. Depending on the weather will depend which way we head back home. I would love to take my husband into Colorado, but we don't have snow chains and I don't want to invest in snow chains for one trip, so we may head back south before heading back north to avoid those steep mountain passes.

We have some friends and family we plan to see

That we plan to stop and see along the way. One of my best friends lives in Arizona and we plan to spend at least a day with her and her husband. We also plan to stop at some family members in Missouri. We will be traveling from Indiana to Arizona and back to Indiana again.

We will be making some stops in between

We just don't know where yet. So if you have any suggestions please leave them in the comments below. We like the outdoors, and we are not big drinkers so please don't say to check out a bar we are not into that scene. I can't believe that in 30 days I been married for 20 years. It seems like yesterday I was just saying I do.