This Sunday Gloria (known here at SP as LUVQUILTING) and I will have been married 40 years!!!! That's so amazing to me in so many ways!! It really doesn't seem that long ago that I had first asked her out. Her dad wouldn't let her go out with me so I went to her house and helped paint a room. (see I knew how to win over parents LOL) In all fairness to her dad, she was only 14 at the time! Yep, we really were just kids and nobody really expected this relationship to turn into anything big! But they were wrong! It turned HUGE!

From the very beginning for us, life was full of adventures and it was always exciting! Most kids hung out at the movies or the drive-in hamburger joints. We went water-skiing, worked on my hot rods, took the motorcycle out for a ride (although I had to pick her up in my car because her mom wouldn't let her on the cycle.) Right from the start, we shared the outdoors - we hiked, we canoed, we biked!

Things didn't always go smoothly. Growing up and growing together provides a lot of opportunities to make a lot of mistakes and we made them, but fortunately we seemed to sense that what we had was good and we always somehow managed to get through the rough spots. I'm afraid that I really need to give Glor the credit here, because without a doubt I'm the one whose common sense is a little on the rare side. So doing stupid things was always pretty easy for me. But she always stuck with me and I'm so very very grateful for that!!!

The adventures never stopped for us and I think that's what keeps our lives so exciting! We've hiked to the peaks of many mountains and into the deepest of valleys. We've traveled all around the US and Canada where we've biked, climbed, kayaked and canoed, roller-bladed, skiied, boogie-boarded, and if it's done outside, we've probably done it!

....and we've danced! We've done a lot of dancing over the last 16 or so years - mostly country dancing. Wherever we travel we look for the honkey-tonks and country bars and we go dancing! In fact, we even teach it! There's very seldom a week goes by that we don't go dancing somewhere!

These 40 years together have brought about 2 amazing sons and now 5 grandchildren and we've been so blessed that our family has always shared our sense of adventure! Even as teens the boys lived the excitement with us. In fact, the teenage years were exciting filled with volleyball tournaments in our back yard, weeks on the lakes, at the shore, on the trails. They were amazing! And now the grandchildren are stepping right into the same footsteps. My 8 year old granddaughter already water-skis. All the kids are into biking and we spend many hours on the rail trails. And every year, there's the family vacation where we all spend a chaotic week of family fun.

Fourty years!!!!! What an amazing 40 years! Boredom is something we just never experienced, I guess we never had time for it, really. So now my high school sweat heart (oops, I meant sweetheart) and I are officially retired and the adventure continues and I expect it will continue for quite some time to come. I am truely the luckiest man I know.

Life is good! very very good!
Wood