ten years.

David and I spent this past week on a mountain outside of Flat Rock, North Carolina, celebrating ten years of marriage.

Wait — did you hear that? A week. Six nights. Just us.

We haven’t taken a vacation of this length since our honeymoon in Barbados, ten years ago to this day. Not with kids, not without kids.

How can that be? It was never our intent to wait this long for a whole-week getaway, but life just happened. You know how it goes. At first we never had money or vacation days, and then kids came along and we used up our babysitting offers for support raising and vision trips and mission agency conferences.

Oh we took vacations, mind you. We’ve had beautiful trips with both my family and David’s. We’ve had snatches of anniversary getaways tied to friends’ weddings or speaking engagements, walked the streets of Savannah and Charleston and Greenville. We’ve traveled the world together, passed, bleary-eyed through airports in London and Frankfurt and Tel Aviv and Dubai.

We’ve visited hill stations in India, a mountainous island off the coast of Malaysia right out of a Lost episode, and played on the clean white beaches of Sri Lanka. We’ve crouched in dark, corrugated tin huts, holding hands with folks dying of AIDS and we’ve cried bitter tears with impoverished mothers who felt compelled to give their child up for adoption.

We’ve toured a Kenyan seminary, wondering if God was calling us to live and study on Africa soil. We’ve grocery shopped at outdoor markets in downtown Manhattan and seen the Lion King on Broadway and stood, sweating on more subway platforms than we can count. We’ve made road trips to 12 states and stayed in homes of friends and family and strangers. We’ve had generous offers of beach homes and mountain homes and jumped at the chance to escape for little getaways.

Most of these trips happened with two little people in tow, which made them all the more memorable and funny and very, very exhausting. And all of our winding travels brought us right back home, to South Carolina, to a whirlwind year of dreaming and laboring and starting a church.

So no, we’ve had no real anniversary trip in a manner of speaking. And no full week away, just our family, just for rest. No real break from cell phones and strategies and raising funds for our next step.

Until now.

This week was a gift, made more so by many, many years of adventure and not a lot of vacation. You know what? I’d never trade the adventure. Never.

We are different people — a different family — because of what we’ve seen and done, because of strange sights and beautiful faces and tears of desperation over having to pack up and move one more time, because of dirt between our toes and punch-you-in-the-gut jet lag and missions conferences, because of stories we’ve heard and hugs we’ve received and the way we’ve seen with our eyes how big and varied God’s world is. Nope, we wouldn’t trade a thing.

But this week, we were glad for a break. We were aching for a break, actually. And after spending months looking online at options like San Francisco and Costa Rica and Guatemala, it makes me smile that we chose perhaps one of the most un-exotic spots possible for the big 1-0, just a few miles outside a little village that more closely resembles Mitford than Malaysia.

David’s mom retired from working 12 years at a college in Pennsylvania earlier this month, and rather than spend her week gardening and reading literature and napping (which is what I would’ve done), she flew down to stay with Judah and Amelie. For six nights. 

While she had adventures with our children, David and I stayed in a log cabin, building crackling fires in the chilly morning and hiking and dipping in the jacuzzi and making trips to Asheville for good food (the food, people. oh my.).

We’re both talkers, which you know, but somehow, this week, we didn’t need a constant stream of words. We were together and separate, working puzzles and taking naps and reading, and it was very, very peaceful. Maybe the peace came just as much from lives that are rooted as from the quiet mountain air.

We made fun new memories along the way. We took a farm-to-table walking restaurant tour of downtown Asheville, sipped cocktails and wine at every stop and sampled some of the best cuisine the city has to offer. I spent an afternoon at the spa (my first time), and was pampered and generally made to feel like a queen.

We poked through quaint little shops and bought chocolate and ate at amazing restaurants. We spent evenings in at the cabin, cooking spicy, vegetable-filled food our kids would hate and staying up way too late. We drank tea and coffee and hiked every day and mostly we just rested. We did whatever we wanted whenever we wanted and I can’t remember the last time that’s happened.

We celebrated in style on the actual day, May 22, with a two-and-a-half hour dinner at Rhubarb, a brand new Asheville restaurant started by a chef with three James Beard award nominations. Because we’re nerds who know what an honor those nominations are, we pulled the chef aside to congratulate him and tell him how much we loved our dinner.

And he sent us out champagne and dessert to top off our evening. It was magical.

I’ll never forget this trip. God knew how much we both needed it. How much rest it’s given us (and yes, we missed Judah and Amelie like crazy).

And the best part of it all was this feeling welling up inside us that we couldn’t wait to get back home — to our kids, our church, our city, our life. That’s the biggest gift.

Here’s to the next ten years!