Coming Clean

:sigh:

This isn’t just a saga of getting to St. John’s. This is a saga of having one succesful and extended romantic get a way.

and it all starts the day after my wedding three and a half years ago.

I had hired a limo service to take us from the hotel to the airport for our flight to St. Thomas (in the not-so-Virgin Islands, if you didn’t know). We get there, we get our bags unloaded, and we’re waiting in line for the curb side check-in. After 10 minutes, we’re at the rep to present our bags. We’re told to go meet an airline representative inside. oookay… so we go meet the person inside, where we are told that somehow volcanic ash from ….some where… had settled in over Virgin Island airspace. No aircraft in or out of the Virgin Islands for at least another 3 days. We were told we needed to go to the customer service desk to make arrangements.

Well, I call my travel agent instead and cancel the whole thing because I just started my new job, I had just got on my assigned program like the week before, and this week of vacation was a very inflexible and big favor. If I was going to be vacationing/honeymooning it was going to be that week or not for another 6 months.

So, St. Thomas (and really, St. John which is why we were going) was cancelled. I had to call my brand-new father-in-law to come pick us up from the airport. AND I got to spend my second day of blissful marriage across the hall from my in-laws. I love my wife, but marriage was sucking.

The next day, I was determined to LEAVE. We decided that we’d spend the week visiting the islands off the Georgia coast. This was the best idea for the money and time we had. I made reservations with an Embassy Suites in Brunswick, GA. I was told the hotel was wonderful, beautiful, that I would love it’s location. We get there, and it attached to a mall. It has two main entrances. One from the outside, and one from the mall. From the mall entrance, you stand across from a K-Mart, like a 4 screen movie theatre, and a brief jaunt away from the foodcourt. :sigh:

So, our week at the islands… could have been better. It rained nearly the whole time, there were actually tornado warnings while we were out and about, and the only nice day we had was filled with mosquitos. The highlight was that my wife got to see armadillos, which, seriously, she gets really excited about.

5 months later we got pregnant. I did a last ditch effort shortly thereafter to try to have a romantic getaway, but Lisa had a cold and her first-term morning sickness was in full swing. So, yes, while the trip I arranged was nice, nausea really kills the whole mood of the trip.

The next trip we had after that was a huge move from Virginia back home to Georgia. That was fun, but in no way romantic or relaxing. Moving an 8 month pregnant woman is… an adventure with lots of pee stops.

So, for our second anniversary, we did a Bed and Breakfast ran by David and Denis. That’s DENIS not DENISE — which I thought it was. Huh, I was pretty surprised when we got there and I realized this place was ran by two gay guys. :sigh: oh well, they were pretty low key about it all, cooked awesome food, and made good conversation. And the jetted tub was awesome. This B&B is in Dahlonega, GA which is home to a number of wineries. We did two of the wineries in the span of an hour and a half. God bless country roads. So, that was fun, but we learned an important lesson on this trip. Wine kicks lactation production into high gear… which, can also kill moods.

Well, now we come to the event we had been waiting nearly a year for. The event that would redeem us from the vacationing fiascos, blunders, and acts of God we had suffered. The Cruise of Love.

The Cruise of Love is something I had named once we started planning it. Most of our circle of friends were going on this cruise. All of them had begun thinking about getting pregnant. This was going to be a HUGE fun-fest with all of us together. AND it was going to be our (Lisa and me) first extended romantic get-a-way. In short, our second shot at a honeymoon.

But then… the hurricanes started showing up. “Luckily” Charlie struck a week and a half before our trip, so we thought we were golden. But then Frances showed up, and we began to fear she would rain on our parade. She did, in fact, rain on our parade. I think Adriene has chronicled the cruise fiasco enough for me to not go into detail. Besides, this thread is going long enough. In short, Frances ruined it. My wife was utterly depressed. And Royal Carribean sucks. Our second shot going to the not-so-Virgin Islands (and St. Thomas and St. John) dashed. And, btw, that was over 3 months ago… and we just got our refund.

So… since then we visited the Biltmore House in Asheville, NC. I got to do the wine tasting, but as my wife is due to deliver in February, she got to have no such fun. It was overall a pleasant experience, but still not exactly what we were hoping for.

So, in short, we stink at vacationing. If you want to camp then I’m your man. I have only 1 bad camping story (actually, it’s a hiking story) to tell and none since I’ve been married.