The Honeymoon

As promised yesterday, I'll give you the rundown of our equally romantic honeymoon.

I'd always wanted to see New England, so I had an entire vacation planned there. My intended's family never vacationed - ever - so he didn't get the part where you go away from home and stay in hotels. (They called going out of town overnight to visit relatives a vacation.) He wasn't up for the New England trip but I said "with or without you I'm going." (Quite the romanticist, eh?) He reluctantly opted to go along.

Here's the part where it all changes. He enlisted in the Air Force just about time we decided to get married. He lived through Basic Training so he got to graduate to Tech School. It wasn't until he got there that he knew how long the school was. We'd decided to get married between Tech School and his first base assignment. He had a 3 month school assignment so that gave me exactly 3 months to completely plan a wedding and honeymoon - by myself. Thankfully I work well under deadlines. And a month away from graduation he found out where he was being stationed. Get this; the AF allows you to list 10 bases that you'd like to be assigned to and they will supposedly choose from your list. My dearest chose all East Coast (United States). You know where we were stationed? Alaska. Not only is it not East Coast, it's not even connected to the West Coast. He would be here for the next 3.5 years and we had no idea when, if ever, we would get back to see our families. He decided to spend the 6 days after the wedding with family instead of in New England. I reluctantly agreed.

And it gets even more romantic than that. We stayed the first two nights at a hotel in town. The next two nights were spent at his parents house and the last two nights were spent at my parents house. We're oozing romance at this point.

And after 6 days of marital bliss we left for the Last Frontier. But not before purchasing a brand new, 1992 Chevy Cavalier. (As an aside, we still have this car. It has 215,000 miles on it and runs like a top. It's been paid for over a decade ago and we cannot bring ourselves to part with it. We threaten to give it to our daughter when she turns 16. She is completely and utterly mortified.) We did not stop for meals since this would eat up precious time. He only had 12 days to get there. We purchased sandwiches at a gas station in the morning when we fueled up and ate them on the road. My husband is anal about his vehicles (4 kids took care of this quite nicely) and I was not allowed to get crumbs in the car. I was also not allowed to stop to take pictures of some of the most breath-taking scenery I've ever seen in my entire life. I got quite good at 60 mph shots, but not before photographing the windshield wiper several dozen times.

We did stay in hotels every night, but once you cross into Canada that takes on a whole new dimension. Showers became optional when the only hotel in town had mildew visibly growing in the tub. And we realized that eating coud be hazardous when we noticed select restaurants sporting the sign "Fully Licensed." I did make him stop and treat me out for lunch one day and he's still pulling the "I told you so" for that. With literally 100 miles between "towns" one can't be selective about where to stop, so when we came to Toad River near the lunch meal we had no choice but to pull over. Now these stops consist of one house along the road with a gas pump in the front yard and the living room converted to a deli. We ordered two sandwiches and two cans of soda. They were out of every meat except bologna, and they served it on buttered bread with wilted lettuce. Uh, yum? The sodas were warm and we didn't get ice in glasses to remedy this. And the cost for all of this was $12 - 15 years ago! He has every right to say "I told you so."

We got to our new home in North Pole, Alaska (no kidding) with 3 days to spare. I was stiff and sore from riding 10 hours in the car 9 days in a row. I was also glad to be eating hot food and sleeping in the same bed twice in a row. But we were together and madly in love so all this was so trivial.

At least we didn't set high standards for ourselves in the romance department.