As you read this, Berta and I might be thousands of miles away from home, possibly in Disneyland.
I’ve long had this dream of winning the lottery, not telling Berta, and then one day sweeping her off (sans-luggage) to the airport where we would fly to some exotic destination and I would eventually impart the news. Well, being that it’s improbable that we’ve won the lottery (at least, as far as I know we have not), I’ve had to set my sights a little lower. So instead of a spontaneous getaway to an exotic locale, we’re having a planned weekend excursion to somewhere not really extravagant, but costly enough to have people wonder if we’re totally nuts.
And of course, we are.
This particular trip is on the occasion of our wedding anniversary. Mom is watching the kids, so we get to spend the whole weekend away without tending them. Yes, I know that going to Disneyland without the kids seems incongruous, but that’s just the kind of people we are.
Originally, we were going to try for Las Vegas, which would be impossible to do properly with the kids in tow. But the prices for flights and hotel there were looking too high, so I threw a mental dart at the map and punched Disneyland into Expedia. The price looked better. Then we adjusted the times for the flights to better suit our availability and ended up with a higher price than the Vegas trip. By then I was tired and I just pushed the “Buy” button.
One might question why we would go to such lengths on just our 8th year anniversary. What will we do on our 10th if we’ve already blown a big travel weekend on our 8th? Well, perhaps you are not aware of our very first anniversary trip to India?
Just before our first anniversary, I was in talks with some of our Indian contractors at work. They wanted me to come visit them in India to get a better understanding of their operations, talk to the developers, etc. I was enthusiastic for the trip, but then the dates fell down, they landed on my anniversary date. I told my boss about the unfortunate , and his reaction was, “Take her with you.”
And so we did. We rushed around and got our passports and visas within two weeks, and boarded a plane on July 16th. We were flying over the Himalayan mountains when we toasted to our wedding using champagne provided by the flight attendant. That trip really deserves a full retelling of its own, but know that even then we knew we were probably never going to top our first year anniversary celebration.
In that context, perhaps the occasional anniversary trip doesn’t seem too far out of order. Any occasion to take a trip to somewhere fun is fine by me, escpecially during this whole house-moving craziness. Give us some points for stacking up the stress.
Hopefully, I’ll have pictures of the trip online soon.
