Thanksgiving Road Trip

Getting engaged in the Grandest of Canyons

By Adam Johnson

November 20^th, 2011

It is time once again for our Thanksgiving pilgrimage to the Southwest. When Jess and I were first dating, we took a Thanksgiving road trip to Moab with the dogs and had a blast. We had to know if the fun could be repeated. This time though, rather than staying in cheap hotels, we’ve got one of them fancy motor homes. Well, not a fancy motor home, but a motor home just the same. It wouldn’t be a road trip in Colorado without waking up to crazy, unexpected weather. I guess we’d probably have expected it had we checked the weather forecast, but who has time to do such things?

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Canyonlands national park

From Glenwood Springs, we drove to Canyonlands National Park, UT. Canyonlands is where Aaron Ralston spent 127 hours pinned between a rock and a hard place. We only planned to spend one night there. We had a nice evening hike around some old caves where bandits used to hang out in the days of the Wild West. My knee is still very much recovering, so we couldn’t do anything too crazy.

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sunrise hike

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The drive down to the Grand Canyon was very interesting. The landscape looks like the moon, only with six times more gravity. In any case, it was nice to finally see this enormous canyon that so many people gloat about. It really is breathtaking. You can see the most incredible photos of the Grand Canyon, but nothing can quite illustrate the grandeur of it.

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The early bird gets engaged

There is a great deal of debate in our relationship about whether Al Gore, Tim Berners-Lee, or Gary Kremen introduced us. One thing we do agree on is that it was a fortunate twist of fate and a very complex compatibility algorithm that put my Match.com profile in front of Jess one night. Little did she know how much that simple click on my Match.com profile would change the course of our lives. A few emails and several phone calls later, Jess and I found ourselves on a first date, laughing hysterically and trying to keep up with too many Bingo cards at the Longmont Bingo Alley. Ten days and ten dates later, we were finding that we did not want to be without each other. Four and a half years later, I decided that there is no need for us to ever be without each other. This morning, halfway down into the Grand Canyon, as the sun was rising over the lip of the canyon walls, I asked Jess if she’d like to continue these fun, exciting adventures for the rest of our lives. She said yes.