In order to start at the beginning, I will assume you are currently in the same place I was a few years ago. For the first 30 + years of my life I had not done much traveling. Most of my vacations had consisted of short, weekend trips that were within driving distance of my home. Luckily some of those trips included heading over to Cape Canaveral, Ft. Lauderdale and Miami to board cruise ships, which by the way are a blast and highly recommended (I will comment on those trips and the advantages of cruising in a future post). But there was not much venturing too far away from home. In fact, I had only been on a plane once in my life, when I was 12, when my Dad and I flew to Arizona to visit my uncle and his family. But I always remembered that first flight. I was so nervous before the plane took off, not knowing what to expect. I was almost sick to my stomach with worry and excitement until the plane taxied down the runway and lifted off the ground. Instantly my nerves and uncomfortable feeling went away and from that moment on I LOVED being in the air. In fact, when the plane landed in Atlanta and we had to change planes for the next portion of the flight I could not wait to get back off the ground.
Fast forward to about nine years ago. I went through a divorce, which for me, was a personally tough thing to go through. In fact, one of things I was planning just prior to our divorce was a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate our 10 year anniversary. We both loved going over to the casinos in Biloxi, Mississippi as out little weekend getaway. We made several trips to Biloxi during our time together. We could both sit at the slot machines for hours, playing the penny slots (we weren't big spenders) and loving it. So as I was thinking about where we could go for our milestone anniversary, it was obvious Las Vegas would be a perfect destination. I mean, Las Vegas IS the casino capital of the world.
Now neither of us were rich...we both had moderate level incomes, she had two teenage kids, and we had just built a fairly nice house roughly three years earlier that consumed a good portion of our paychecks. But still, I wanted to make this anniversary extra special, because for me, it was. I wanted it to be a surprise and I had several elabote things I was thinking of doing to keep it a surprise up until the day we left. She was not going to be told any of this...but she would have loved the spontinaiety of it. I was going to have a limo pick her up at work unexpecedly, already with her bags packed with the essentials through some help from her female cousin, prearranged time off from work with her boss, wisked off to the airport where I would have kept her guessing on the location of her trip up until the final boarding call on the last leg of the flight. I had not worked out all of the details yet, but that was the general plan.
Once in Vegas, I thought about arranging a special candlelit dinner on the rooftop of some casino (just the two of us) where I would propose to her all over again and renew our vows. I don't if I could have actually pulled the whole thing off, but I was going to try.
Unfortunately, things in our marriage took an unexpected turn and we wound up seperating just before our 10 year anniversary. Two months later, we were divorced and I never got the opportunity to carry out the Las Vegas plan.
MORE IN PART II
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