New York, New York

This is me before leaving for the airport. Without my photographer (daughter) along, I really don't have any good ones from the city.


I have to tell you that I have the most spontaneous, romantic husband in the world!!

You are all laughing if you know my husband...he wanted me to be sure I gave him proper accolades for his anniversary gift to me!!

He really is the best guy in the whole world, but spontaneous would NOT normally describe him.....but....this past Wednesday was our 14th wedding anniversary.

He had to go to New York City for a business meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, so he invited me to fly up on Wednesday afternoon for a late dinner with him and fly back on Thursday morning.

My sweet friend Marqui agreed to spend the night with my children and my amazing teenagers encouraged me to go and promised they would hold down the fort until Ms. Marqui arrived....so off I jetted to NYC for dinner!

First, the good news!!

My husband and I had a wonderful, romantic anniversary dinner at a contemporary French restaurant called Daniel. It was six courses, extraordinary service, delicious and beautifully prepared food, exquisite wine pairings. Waiters with lovely French accents explaining what in the world we were eating. Classy, New York style atmosphere....all kinds of people in and out.

Could there possibly be any bad news??

Well, here's the bad news. I am not twenty-five anymore!! I don't really feel old, per say. I think I am in pretty good shape, but I have to tell you that all nighters in New York City are for the twenty-somethings. Not the thirty-something mothers of four! By the time I got home at 1:30 Thursday afternoon, functioning on one hour and thirty minutes of sleep (literally) - I felt like I had been hit by a Mack truck!

It also did not help that every leg of both my flights I was on planes with delays due to "mechanical problems." FYI if you are a pilot - it is not a good idea to get on the loudspeaker when you are sitting on the runway and suddenly the power to the plane SHUTS DOWN for a full five minutes, like every light off, NO noise coming from the engines, and tell the passengers that (and I quote) you "don't know why that happened, but you are sure that the engines wouldn't have failed if we were in the air." Needless to say I was a little nervous on the flight up wondering if the pilot had a clue!!

Then on the return flight which my husband and I were both on there was a "mechanical problem" with the nose alignment. Now, I'm not sure, but the pilot came out to converse with the man sitting next to me (don't ask why I wasn't sitting with my husband!) and told him the problem in detail. The man next to me who claimed to understand the inner workings of airplanes explains that if they had not caught this problem before take off we (and I quote again) "probably wouldn't have crashed, but we would have done one of those nose landings where the plane skids down the runway and possibly bursts in to flame.

Combine that with the air pocket we hit about an hour into the flight which caused the entire plane to dip to the right and then straighten out sharply and needless to say I was figuratively "on my face" the entire flight! If God grows tired of repeated prayers, I can assure you He was tired of my begging Him to get me off that plane and back to my kids!

I am not afraid to fly (at least I wasn't before this trip) and I am not even afraid to die -- however, it was not lost to me that my husband and I had boarded the same plane at the last minute. We were supposed to fly home separately due to full flights and on the last leg from Atlanta home they had a seat available. It was supposed to get me home an hour earlier, so I took it. As I am praying earnestly, that one stinking hour really didn't seem to matter when I thought of BOTH of us on that plane -- you know, the one with the "mechanical problems." Then, ironically, the plane I was originally supposed to be on touched down right behind us -- we had not even gotten off the plane when I looked out the window and saw the other one land!!

Oh well, we made it safely -- and I got my fill of spontaneity for a while!

Seriously, I do want to thank my husband for the trip and the dinner -- I am so blessed to have been married to such an amazing man for the past 14 years!! I look forward to many, many more!