The Summer Project: The honeymooners (1997)

Summer 1997 was dominated by wedding, wedding, and more wedding for Lori and me. The only travel we did was to Chicago and northern Wisconsin for wedding showers, or around the Midwest to other people's weddings (we easily attended double-digit weddings between 1996-2000). I don't remember much else that June and July other than planning for our own wedding, to be held on Aug. 2.

Our wedding weekend was wonderful -- all the planning worked out, and all the things that didn't go right didn't make much of a difference in the grand scheme. We took the Monday afterward off, then worked the rest of the week and departed for our honeymoon on Friday. 

Lori and I decided on Colorado for our trip because we knew it wouldn't be too expensive and would be more adventurous and, well, personal (for lack of a better word) than, say, an all-inclusive resort in a tropical locale -- not that we would have time to get passports that summer, anyway. Lori had never been to the mountains before (minus a train rid to the Pacific Northwest when she was a teenager), and I had never really been west of Missouri. The choice was intriguing, and we had nothing planned. We would just drive west and see where the honeymoon took us.

I worked until only noon that Friday morning, and Lori got out of work early, so we were on the road mid-afternoon. Crossing into Iowa kind of confirmed that our adventure was officially in motion. We made our way to Interstate 80, stopped at a McDonald's for dinner, and found a hotel west of Omaha to spend the night.

The next day, we traversed Nebraska and eastern Colorado to finally arrive in Denver. We stayed two nights in there, exploring the city, going out to eat, and seeing "Face/Off." After that, we spent two nights in Vail and two in Winter Park, excited to enjoy an active mountain vacation.

Our four days in the Rockies didn't exactly turn out that way. We did manage a couple hikes (one in Vail, and a short one in Winter Park), but the weather kept thwarting us -- temperatures dropped into the 50s in what were a few unusually cool August days. We thought renting mountain bikes would be fun, but that seemed like too much work. Vail was a nice town to walk around (we even found a bookstore with a big sale -- I still own, but haven't read, a Bruce Springsteen book I bought that day); Winter Park was fun to drive around and explore. We stayed in condos in both mountain towns and ended up making our own meals a couple times. And, we sat in the hot tub a lot.

So this wasn't the honeymoon we envisioned, but it was exactly the honeymoon we needed. After a long summer planning and executing the wedding, Lori and I needed a week to decompress, away from Wisconsin, enjoying our new marriage and what we accomplished, but not piling on more activity than our exhausted selves could handle. The best part of the summer Colorado honeymoon was we were together as husband and wife for the first time. A few hours driving the back roads of Winter Park, listening to music and enjoying the rainy scenery, were just as meaningful -- if not more -- than a daylong bike ride down a mountainside. 

We left the mountains and went to a waterpark in Denver -- temperatures were back in the 80s at the lower elevation, and the day was perfect to swim, splash, and slide. Then, we began the long trip back to Madison, staying overnight in Grand Island, Nebraska, and arriving home late the next afternoon.

Besides being a great honeymoon, our trip set a template for future summer road trips that we've used and refined in the 25 years since. And though there are more memories of this vacation I could share, there was one more that made our honeymoon unique.

In Iowa, we turned off Interstate 80 to begin the diagonal slant toward Madison. The clouds above us were becoming ominous, and eventually we were driving our Corolla (which we still own) through a thunderstorm. We turned on the radio to hear of a tornado warning, with a twister being reported on Highway 30.

"Joe, we're on Highway 30," Lori exclaimed. We now began to worry, are we going to rear-end a tornado? But we turned up another highway and began heading north and the storm was headed east. The rain eventually subsided, and we never got near the tornado. That was a relief. After all, we already had survived our whirlwind summer.