Anniversary Weekend

I surprised Ryan last year for our anniversary and took us on an overnight trip to Six Flags. This year I asked him to cook up a surprise. He did a great job. He asked me to take Wednesday off from work, which was in and of itself a fantastic present. I left the cell phone at home, and didn't have to attend to a single call or any of the 23 messages that were waiting for me when I returned.

We drove out to Augusta, Missouri, which is considered Missouri wine country. Ryan found a lovely bed and breakfast for us amidst the rolling hills. Here's the view we had from the house we stayed in. The picture doesn't accurately reflect the fact that the pond you see in the background is actually down at the bottom of a valley, several hundred feet below. They had a vineyard on their property as well. Ryan and I were stronly considering buying property out there, it was so pretty!

Ryan had put something in the back of our SUV but whatever it was, was hidden under a blanket. When we got to Augusta, I kept noticing some kind of trail beside the road. I was curious, because it looked like a road, but I kept seeing signs like state parks have, but it was more road than trail. Finally, Ryan swept back the blanket and showed me that he had packed bikes and we were going to bike along the Katy trail, the longest "rails to trails" bike path in the country. (No, we didn't have to bike the whole thing!)

We started our day by having lunch at a local joint in a tiny town nearby. We visited two wineries afterwards. Since it was about noon on a Wednesday, there weren't exactly a lot of people at any of the places we went. We were told that if we went there on a weekend, the line would be out the door. It was nice to have specialized attention. The first place we visited was called the "Blumenhof" and only used grapes grown in Missouri. The next place we visited was called Baluducci Vineyards, and they had a nice tasting room on a farm overlooking a valley.



At that point we decided to jump on our bikes and hit the trail. It was incredibly humid and sticky and unfortunately we hadn't brought any bug spray, but we discovered that by staying moving on the bikes, we could outrun the bugs and keep our bodies cool in the wind. However, we tried to stop as little as possible.

We discovered a couple cool markers along the way. The first one we came to was a marker that told us that Lewis and Clark had crossed the Missouri River at that spot. In fact, Lewis had almost fallen off a cliff and died nearby! Here's Ryan staning at the spot.



The trail was once the Katy railroad, and with Missouri being so hilly in parts, they build the railroad along the river basin of the Missouri, since it was flat. Luckily, that meant flat biking for us! Although Missouri doesn't seem mountainous, in fact, a lot of the groud in Missouri is rock. Biking along the trail was cool because you had the river basin on one side, and a rock wall on the other.



As you can see, the upside of all the mosquito-producing moisture was a very lush landscape.



This sign at one of the mile markers made us laugh. Apparently you're not allowed to toss missles at animals, unless you get consent. :)

We also learned that Daniel Boone settled in this area when he was older, and brought a lot of his family with him. We passed a farm that says it was owned by some of the family members. (Our bed and breakfast hostess told us that an elderly neighbor of hers, who just died, told us that her mother knew Daniel Boone, or perhaps her parents did. She said that the locals got along great with the native Amercans until Daniel Boone arrived, and they didn't like him because he antagonized the Indians. You certainly won't read that in elementary school history books!)

We are certainly not professional bikers and 20 miles on the trail made us quite tired and sore. We ended up the day by hitting another winery in town (called the Augusta Winery) and having dinner at a brew-pup in town that had a nice outdoor seating area. As much as we hoped for some kind of romantic evening, we were both sound asleep by 9:30!

The next morning, our hostess had prepared a nice breakfast for us, which we ate on the outdoor patio, enjoying the scenic view.

On our way back into town, we noticed a giant mound that looked like a landfill, except it was covered with rocks. We were intrigued, and decided to stop. It turns out that it was... a nuclear waste landfill.



Yup, that's right! Turns out that during World War II, there was a munitians factory there that manufactured TNT and refined uranium. The place became dormant and was in massive disrepair, and in the 80's it became a superfund site. They spent nearly a billion dollars cleaning it up. Now, nearly everything from the plant has been placed in containers that are buried under massive amounts of dirt, rock, clay, etc. You can now walk up the mound (which we did) and read all about the cleanup in an "interpretive center". Their big concern is that the half life of the waste is 3.5 million years, and people need to know about it in the future. If they didn't keep educating people that the waste dump is there, in a hundred years, someone's going to try to build a subdivision on it or something like that. You can see a picture here of how the mound was constructed.



So, in true Bertram style, we ended up a wonderful anniversary by learning about nuclear waste. It seemed to follow nicely in the vein of our first anniversary, when we learned about electricty generation.

In all seriousness, it was a wonderful way to get away, and I'm so happy to have been with my husband for 3 great years together.