Not your average honeymoon

An offbeat wedding wouldn’t be complete without an atypical honeymoon, which is exactly what  Ryan and I experienced earlier this week. Due to several factors (we paid for most of the wedding ourselves, we just took a week-long rock-climbing trip to Colorado in August, and Ryan has an upcoming business trip for which he needed to prepare), we decided to keep our trip low-key and took a three-day excursion to Horseshoe Canyon Ranch, our favorite rock-climbing destination in Arkansas. I even offered to camp to help keep costs down (a camping honeymoon is better than no honeymoon at all!), but fortunately Ryan wouldn’t hear of it, so we booked two nights at a cozy little cabin operated by a place called Little Switzerland, which we always pass on our way to the ranch and thought it looked like a fun place to stay.

Though the day of the actual wedding was chilly and a bit overcast, we lucked out with the weather for our trip, and had beautiful weather for climbing. The ranch is gorgeous in the fall — sprawling hillsides covered with trees — but I forgot our camera and was unable to locate a disposable one at the gas stations we stopped at. So we don’t have any pictures of the actual honeymoon, but at least I have the consolation that already have countless pictures of the ranch, and with just the two of us there, the only pics of the two of us would have been of the cheesy self-portrait variety.

The trip was not without other complications as well .… Due to my severely hungover state the day after the wedding (for some reason I thought vodka was a good idea), packing alcohol was the furthest thing on my mind. But as both the ranch and the cabin are in a dry county, we arrived at our room only to realize we were unable to buy alcohol in any of the nearby towns. Ryan refused to spend our honeymoon without any beer and we were without a GPS unit, so the safest bet was driving back to the Missouri border. Which meant that after spending all day in the car, we had to drive another hour just to get beer.

Tuesday, though, we got in a full day of climbing, or at least as much as we could handle until the rough rock and our tight shoes forced us to call it a day. Somehow every time we go to Horseshoe, I end up with some sort of weird breakout on my face. This trip was no exception, even though we didn’t camp. I need to start paying more attention to the plants and make sure I’m not coming in contact with anything poisonous.

We spent much of the trip relaxing in our cabin, drinking our beer and watching HGTV, so it wasn’t all that different from being at home, but it was a nice getaway just the same.