I sighed. "I have that much room on my credit card."

He looked doubtful, but was listening.

"Here's a list of everything they provide." As I read to him, his expression changed. The list of things that was included in the price - a cake, music, a personal consultant, a professional photographer with 40 digital images and the ability to purchase hundreds more, champagne, an extremely scenic location, and most of all... A wedding. No, not just most of all. Best of all.

They told us that they could do it. They could get us married. Sure, we could get married in Iowa via the JOP. But we didn't want that. We wanted a ceremony and something to remember for the rest of our lives. We have no intentions of there ever being another occasion like this one. We want to get married once, and once only. So - a beautiful wedding or a JOP?

We decided.

On the credit card it went. By now it was about 9:30, and we still hadn't finished packing. The kids weren't ready to go. We had to leave at noon for the Chicago airport.

Hustle, hustle. Aaron and I went into overdrive as we tried to get everything together so that we wouldn't miss our plane. Right before noon, we got the kids dropped off, the paperwork faxed to Fenella to charge our credit card, the contract signed for the wedding service (and faxed), and we'd gotten me a diet coke. I needed it. Bad. After the last 18 hours I'd had, I felt like I was about to go out of my mind.

I sipped on my d-coke (ha! Who am I kidding? That sucker was down in 5 minutes flat), and we drove to Chicago. Four hours. Lots of tollways.

We got to the airport in plenty of time (particularly considering our flight was delayed), and sat around. And around. And around. At about this point, I was very thankful for the 8 or so books I'd made Aaron lug around in his carry-on. (Hey, it was a fair trade. I was lugging his tux and all his shirts as "my carry on.")

At 8:20, our flight took off. The flight was rather uneventful - so much so that I don't even remember what I did. They may have showed us the movie "The Bucket List." I do believe that I saw that movie three times on our way to and from St. Lucia.

We arrived in Miami around 2 am. Unfortunately, our flight didn't leave until 6:20, and the airport was closed. The only food was a rundown-looking Burger King, from which we partook (greedily).

We scouted around for a place to sleep, and couldn't find a good one. At one point, we found this nice comfy looking bench with a three inch cushion. All the good chairs around the airport had already been taken, so we settled down. I was reading while Aaron took a snooze, when all of a sudden I heard this loud, "Ahem." I paused. "AHEM." I looked around.

A man holding a broom made a shooing motion at me, "You can't sleep there miss."

I blinked. "Okay, thanks." I woke Aaron up. We moved over to the next place we could find that didn't seem to have watchful eyes. It was a floor. A dirty, dusty floor. And it was freezing.

By this point, I'd been awake for 19 hours and really wanted to sleep. However, there were people all around us: some talking about their trip to South America, some snoring, others just looking shady. I sneezed and tossed and turned. Then I picked up another book and finished it off while Aaron snored lightly.

I figured that maybe I'd catch a nap on the next plane, but little did I know that I'd be awake for around 35 hours.

Labels: marriage, traveling