A Theme for Year #2?

Our first wedding anniversary celebration weekend has been set for a few weeks.  We were going to go enjoy some warm Spring Break weather down in Corpus Christi, Texas.  Visions of warm beaches, the Gulf of Mexico, a reasonably comfortable hotel, and a fun weekend away from our rut were dancing through my head as I was making reservation after reservation for the fateful trip.

Friday arrived.  We watched the clock with anticipation for our 5 o’clock departure to DFW airport.  We hopped in the car and were halfway to the airport when A2 remembered we needed to look up the terminal and gate for our flight.  Out came the iPhone and the txt message from American Airlines:

Gate 3

“Gate 3,” I wondered?  There are 6 terminals and about 40 gates per terminal, and we have “Gate 3″…

To make a long story short, I booked our flights backwards, CRP > DFW.  ARGH!

After an hour of wrangling our money back from the greedy airline and hotel, we were back to square one.  Now what do we do?

Luckily we had already discussed a “Plan B” earlier in the week (without really knowing it was our plan B).  We had talked about how fun it would be to go up to Oklahoma City to see our BYU Cougars play in the NCAA tournament.  Of course, this was before they broke the 17 year first-round losing streak, so we had discussed it as more of a pipe-dream.  But with the Cougars winning game one on Thursday, the opportunity to see them in the Big Dance was now alive and well.

We quickly made a hotel reservation outside of Oklahoma City (in little Yukon, OK), and quickly booked some tickets on StubHub to the game.  Then we got back into the car and started the drive northward.  We had won the battle against the planning problems, now we had to win the battle against the weather.

Why we would embark northward at a time when the weirdest mid-March snow storm was headed into Oklahoma, I’ll never know.  Men do strange things to show their love to their wives, I guess.  I felt better when we arrived and saw the even-crazier people who had driven from Kansas and elsewhere to see their team play in the tournament.

Luckily, we beat the weather and arrived at our hotel safely.  The wind howled quite loudly that night, and we awoke to some pretty wet, icy, sloppy, slippery conditions.  We made our way to downtown OKC, where we got our tickets and enjoyed some really awesome bball.  (Yeah, we saw UNI upset the tournament favorites, KU)  (More on the games in another post, maybe…)

The best part of our vacation, though, was the time we got to spend in the car together (albeit white knuckling it all day on Saturday and Sunday around OKC).  I have the awesomest wife on the face of the whole planet.  We laughed together, we teased each other, we talked about serious subjects and we talked about joyful subjects.

I decided that our honeymoon vacation was a great indication of how our first year of marriage went: perfect.  Flawless.  Without a hitch.  Adventurous.  Unpredictable.  Awesome.

I am now wondering if our first anniversary trip will be an indication of how this next year will go… not exactly what we planned, and with great need for flexibility and adjustment, but still full of fun, laughter, happiness, pleasure, joy, kindness, and comfort – just because I’m spending it with her.