My husband and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary this year on Aug. 14, although he insists our real anniversary was our first date which was on Oct. 31, 1982.

After eating out somewhere (I really don’t remember where), we decided that since it was Halloween, we should go meandering in a cemetery. I had always found old headstones fascinating, but I’m not sure what we could really see after dark. We didn’t get far, however, before a policeman tracked us down and sent us packing. Evidently cemeteries are off-limits after dark. Who knew? Certainly not two stupid college students.

We tried several other dating adventures that year–most of which should have been avoided. Back then I lived close to the Harlan Co. Reservoir in S. central Nebraska, and I had a big, green, inflatable chair. We went down to the beach one fairly windy evening to do a bit of floating.

We had no idea just how much floating we were going to do before the evening was over.

We got just a little bit over the swimming area ropes and due to the strong wind could not get back with both of us paddling. Before we knew it, we were far from shore. Oh yeah, did I mention that we could hear air hissing from somewhere on our luxurious floating device. Thankfully, there was at least one boat on the lake that evening, who rescued us far from either side.

You’d think that after that one, we would have stayed away from water, but one boring evening, we decided to go tubing down the river. I’d done it before, but this particular evening, the river was flowing really, really slowly. As it was getting dark, and we could see shapes along the edge and hear things splashing in, I started to get a bit apprehensive. Okay, I was more than apprehensive, I was freakin” scared out of my skin! And if it got so dark that we couldn’t see the landmark to get out, we’d miss where our car was parked, and who knew where we might end up. Eventually, we did see the marker we were looking for and hauled our behinds out of the river, vowing to never, ever do that again.

Maybe these early dating disasters are why we hardly do anything more exciting than a bit of hiking now…in a populated area…in the middle of the afternoon…with a compass, water, and extra clothes.

Okay, we’ve never actually taken extra clothes, but it might be a good idea.