A little escape...

 Jed and I are celebrating our 11th anniversary here in just a couple months.   And we finally got around to celebrating our 10th!!  For our 10th we were planning a big ol' trip for just the two of us, since we have never before done that since our honeymoon! We modified our trip plans--we decided to take the kids to Disneyland for Christmas with some of our trip funds, so then we just took a smaller trip down to Phoenix--just the two of us. 
It was so nice.
It was so strange to leave the kids and it was a little surreal at first.
But after a quickie flight, we landed right here in Phoenix with this view from our hotel room: (my awesome camera skills at work ;)

 And the lap pool view from our room as well:

 This was the lobby:

 It was a pretty awesome hotel, although the downside was having to pay everyday to park our car!  Ah city life...
One of the "must do's" on my list was to visit a Trader Joe's grocery store.  It was seriously one of the main highlights of my trip.  :)

And this sign?? vv   I couldn't have said it better myself:

 I was in grocery store heaven, and it stinks to come home and there is no dried mango slices to be found anywhere in the regular old grocery stores around here.  :(  They were the best!!

We had little picnics outside all the time, the weather was gorgeous! I felt like dancing in the street because the weather was so perfect!!
There was a fun little mini mall courtyard right across the street from our hotel, and we visited it many times:

It amazes me to see all this greenery in January!

And I very much love palm trees.  ;)

Drew loves k'nex, so I had to take a picture of this pretty darn incredible Ferris wheel made completely out of k'nex.

Ok, so we bought this Asiago Cheese Bread with black pepper at Trader Joe's and it was incredible.  Best bread ever.  We had a picnic right outside the store and after we tasted it, we went and got 2 more.  Soooooo goood.  ;)  We ate it for lunch pretty much every day.

 Having one of our picnics in the courtyard.

 We fed a lot of birds too. 

 I love the different foliage in the desert.  I can't get enough of the palms, of course, but I really started to love all the cool cacti and pointy flowery green plants--very technical and accurate I'm sure.  :)

 And of course the citrus trees.
And the saguaro cactus?  Way cool. (there are waaay too many pictures of me in this post, but that is what happens when you have no children to pose for you).

 This picture below was totally staged for my kids, "no pat no!  don't sit on that!"  If you don't read Dr. Suess, you will not know what I'm talking about.

 More cactus fun.

 And more....

just a little more....

ok, there.  That's it for now.

 We really wanted to do a session in the Mesa temple, but unfortunately we learned the temple was closed for a couple of weeks due to a leak. 

 Jed and I went to Arizona before we were married, and I picked an orange off a tree at the temple.  So, traditions must be kept.  I tempted Jed to pick a fruit for me.  :)

 And there it is.

 So after visiting the Mesa temple grounds, we headed to another one:

 The Gilbert Arizona temple was holding its public open house and we got our reservations to go through and see it.
It was incredibly beautiful and detailed.
We loved the experience there.

 Someone took a picture of us:

 Another cool cactus ^^
On another day, Jed and I wanted to go hiking.  We searched on the internet for something not too hard but not too easy, and that would take just a few hours.  But when we got up in these mountains.....we couldn't figure out where the trail head was for the hike we picked.

 But we looked around at several trail heads, and decided on one where several people were headed.  It looked pretty popular, so we gave it a shot.
Well, we figured out soon enough that it must have been a favorite of the physically fit because it was no walk in the park.  :)
But we hung in there.
Barely......
(another one of my wishes for the trip was to admire cacti in the wild, and I got that wish on our hike day)

 The hike seemed to go on forever, and just as you thought you reached the top.....there was more.  This happened to us several times.  Our workouts in the exercise room back at the hotel were no preparation for this hike.  :)  It was like eternal stairs.

 But we made it.  And the view was of city all around:

 A sticky, sweaty mess:
(also I thought it was funny that in arizona you hike in your nice workout clothes and not your old grubbies, who knew?)

 On our trip we wanted to hit a few different kinds of restaurants, (we took it easy on breakfast and lunch and went for the gold on dinner) we did Mexican, a steakhouse, Chinese, breakfast, and then we went to the Rainforest Cafe.  I had never been to one before, and it was pretty fun.

 The cafe was in a mall that also had an aquarium we were headed to see.
It was a very nice place with tons and tons of fish and different tanks. 

 This weird looking thing down below is an eel.

It was neat to see a puffer fish again.  The first one Jed and I saw was in Hawaii on our honeymoon, and we actually were swimming after it trying to make it puff.  Thankfully we didn't catch it, because we learned on this trip they are actually poisonous.  ;)

 This red thing is an octopus:

 a pretty cool tunnel tank:

 We finally saw this elusive sea turtle after waiting for it for quite some time....

Some other fun things we did:
-went to the movie frozen, and have received a lot of flack from our children for not taking them.  ;)
-I,of course, cried because I missed my children.  Once in the movie, and another time when we called them.
-We discovered that we can get so much stuff packed in a day when you are not with children.  A crazy realization.  ;)
-We watched the Food Network for fun--we're nerdy like that.  ;)
-Jed taught me how to swim--at least tried.
-Got ice cream.
-Went on walks.
-Discovered our latest fast food fad, goodbye big Carl, and hello classic taco from Taco Bell.
 -Drove around different cities like Scottsdale, Gilbert, and Tempe.
-visited a catholic Basilica that was close to our hotel.
It was so good to just be together, it was awesome.
I also learned my children are etched in my heart forever.  I missed them  so, so, so much.
It was so great to be all together again.  :)