Living the Dream

I had an incredible weekend with Rosey in Alabama! The photos are here.

What surprised me the most about meeting Rosey was that I didn't get nervous at all; not even when I got off the plane in Birmingham. When we finally met it was like I had known her forever and this wasn't really our first meeting. In fact, I was so comfortable around her that I think that it made her a little uncomfortable at first :)

We talked alot. We laughed alot. We even laughed about some of the things that we talked about. It amused us both that we were comfortable enough to talk about a number of things that were atypical for 'first date' conversations. Even when we weren't talking it was just good to be in each other's company.

Our drive up to Bankhead National Forest was one such occasion where we didn't talk a whole lot but were still comfortable and just enjoyed being together. It was a beautiful day, my iPod was cranking good music through the stereo, and we just sat holding hands and enjoying the passing scenery and the warm sunlight beating down through the windows of Rosey's Silver Rodeo.

Holding hands was something that we did a lot of over the weekend. In fact it seemed like hardly a moment went by where we weren't touching each other in some (totally innocent :) way. I loved that; I'm a very kinesthetic person.

Kissing was another thing that we did a lot of. We must have kissed a thousand times. It almost got to be a problem. On several occasions, we were just about to head out somewhere when we would 'accidentally' get locked in embrace and inevitably get distracted from our original plan :)

Camping in Bankhead National Forest was awesome. We backpacked in several miles alongside the Sipsey River, sometimes hiking in the river itself. We setup camp at a spot on the bank of the river where we could hear a waterfall in the distance. There were a ton of waterfalls. Well, Rosey called them waterfalls, I called them water trickles :)

Rosey did all of the packing for the trip. It was almost amusing to me (in an endearing sort of a way) how thorough she was. She thought of everything. She actually bought me a special pair of shoes for hiking in the river and a head mounted flashlight for hiking the trails at night (both of which came in handy).

Ironically, after all of that preparation, there was one thing that we actually forgot to pack in: the cooking kit. So, we had a sterno stove and plenty of food but nothing to cook in :) Fortunately, Rosey had packed enough snizzacks (snacks) to last us an entire week. So we didn't starve by any stretch of the imagination. Rosey was still a little disappointed by the oversight. She had worked so hard to prepare a 'perfect' camping trip only to have her plans thwarted by a delinquent cooking kit.

It's hard to pick a favorite moment from the weekend, but I could at least throw out a few moments that would be competitors were I to make such a distinction. It would be one of: laying with my head on Rosey's lap on the rocks behind the 'waterfall' above our campsite, taking an impromptu 'shower' beneath the waterfall up the hiking trail from our campsite, cuddling beneath the sheets in the tent and wasting away the morning talking on Sunday, or giving and then receiving a full body massage on Sunday night back at the hotel in an attempt to relieve our sore muscles.

When we talked later in the weekend about how the other person differed from our expectations going into the weekend I told Rosey that she was pretty much exactly what I had expected. I wasn't disappointed or caught off guard in any way. I think that's why I was able to feel so comfortable around her.

It almost freaked me out how closely Rosey matched my 'dream'. The only bad thing about that is that the whole weekend felt like a dream. Had she differed from my imagination it would have dragged me back down to reality and grounded me a little. But she didn't. It felt like I spent a weekend living inside of my own dream.

I suppose that in the grand scheme of things that there are worse problems to have than living in your dreams :) Nonetheless, I am hoping to be able to snatch Rosey from the ether and pull her down into my everyday life where she can keep me company. Or maybe I'm looking at things the wrong way. Maybe what I need to do is to find a way to elevate myself into the ether to join her.