We originally planned the trip to go to my friend, Heather's, wedding reception. She and I have been friends since my grad school days - when she moved here to Ohio to be a whale trainer at Sea World. (She does the coolest things!) We laugh because she is about 6 years younger than me and watched me last until age 29 to get married. At 23, she for sure was thinking, "It's true that Amy and I have a lot in common and my life seems to follow her path a lot. But no way am I going to be 29 and NOT married!" :-) (She can correct me if I'm wrong.) Anyways, she got married at the end of July, just 6 weeks short of her 29th birthday. I'm so, so happy for her, and just so glad I could be there for her along the way to understand "the wait". (For those of you reading who are not of our faith, I know 29 doesn't sound old. And it isn't, really. But typical Mormon age for marrying tends to be earlier in the 20's. Especially out West. And as with any "wait" in life, it has it's ups and downs. Particularly when living in Utah!)
Here's a picture of the beautiful bride and groom and their parents.
Anyways, the kicker is that we went down there expressly for this wedding reception (adding in some business travel for Greg afterwards), and we never made it to the reception! It was just a whole bunch of horrible luck, come to find out. We had left Ohio in time to get to our hotel in Morgantown and make it to the reception by about 6:30. We arrived a little later than hoped (5:45), but we immediately started getting ready while Greg got out the computer and mapped the church address where the reception was being held. You must know, before I tell the details of this story, that my husband is a true GPS system. We went to Dallas, TX for a seminar when we were first married and Greg literally showed me around the town as if he had been there many times before. When I asked him how he knew his way around so well, he casually answered that he had visited there once on business. Now, I'm not one who is too bad with directions, but I sure don't have the knack for just knowing where I am and which direction I am going - instinctively - like he does. Especially after being somewhere only once! So...that said, we use map programs like Google, Yahoo, and Mapquest regularly without a problem. To assume we could look up the directions quickly when we got there seemed logical. Well, hindsight is 20/20.
Greg was having no luck finding the address as he punched it into several programs - including his desktop software program, MapPoint. We were kicking ourselves for not asking Heather directions beforehand, or for not looking the address up ourselves beforehand so we would actually be able to call Heather when she was available - if we had a problem. (At this point she was standing in a reception line for her own wedding.) As Greg couldn't find the info he needed, we figured we could call info for the church phone # and maybe someone would answer. No luck. We called that number several times. Once we were ready, we asked the people at the front desk if they knew where this address was located. They were stumped. Yet they had boasted that they surely could tell us because they knew where everything was. I would have called Heather's cell phone to at least leave a message, only it didn't occur to me to bring the # with me. (It is stored in my home phone and I haven't had a cell phone for a few months now.) Greg was also having trouble getting certain pop-ups to appear on his computer. So while we waited in the car, he went to the business center at our hotel to see if he could have any luck there. He came back to the car with some directions - the first success he had in finding them. They were directions that he had looked up on our church's website - and the map was telling us that the address was eastward, almost to Maryland! Located somewhere that was going to take a good hour and a half to reach. At this point we had no recourse. And we would have felt horrible had we not at least tried this address that seemed way too far away to even possibly be the place.
So we started driving. Around 7:45, Elizabeth fell asleep. Shortly after that we started getting onto some very windy, twisty, hilly back roads. At this point we figured we weren't going to find the reception, and resigned ourselves to that. I was disappointed, but there wasn't much we could do. Then, while still in the backwoods, Greg gets a phone call from a sales rep he had just hired. We couldn't believe he could actually answer the phone and get reception where we were! Then, right in the middle of his business phone call, Molly threw up. Twice. All over the place. Poor girl was just car sick, turns out. We stopped at the side of the road and cleaned up, then got on our way. Molly fell asleep shortly thereafter. In the meantime it started to get dark and I was feeling pretty carsick myself. I was just praying for a straight road somewhere! We eventually made it all the way to our "destination", without even seeing the church building anywhere. So who knows if it even existed! We found a different route to go home, which was pretty windy at first, but then evened out. Whew! When we got back to "civilization", I called info for Heather's parent's phone # and left a message there with Greg's cell phone #. We finally got back to the hotel at 10:30 pm! Thankfully the girls slept the rest of the trip. I just went to bed hoping we would be able connect with Heather the next day!
In the morning while we were getting ready for the day, I wrote Heather an email from Greg's cell phone. Thinking that if she was wondering where we were, she might check her email. After I got ready and she hadn't called, I decided to try her parent's # one more time (not knowing where Heather was staying, because often she stayed at her grandfather's house). Anyways, I called and thankfully Heather answered. See had desperately beeen trying to find us without success. She was so worried because she knew it wasn't like us to not show up when we had said we would be there. She even slipped out of the receiving line at around 7:00 to try and call my parent's house to see if she could find out anything about us! My parents weren't home when she called, so no luck there. Turns out she had changed cell phones only a few months earlier. Before that, she had Greg's cell phone in her contacts. Then when she got back to her parent's house after the reception, she did get the message I left, but it was all broken up because apparently I didn't have as great of reception as I thought I did! She could hear it was me, but couldn't make out Greg's phone #. She couldn't get on the internet at her parents' to check email. And she even went through the phone book calling hotels to find us on Saturday morning. She had thought we were staying at Residence Inn. (We were going to, but we found a different suite hotel a little later that was cheaper, but didn't tell her we had changed our minds). Eventually, because she was calling every hotel in the phone book, she did get to ours. She called it, and wouldn't you believe it...they said we weren't staying there! A bazillion other things happened to prevent us from connecting or getting there, so Heather's mom even mentioned later that for some strange, weird reason we just weren't supposed to be there! We were fortunate, though, that we could spend the day Saturday with Heather and John Paul at Heather's parent's house. Then we saw them again at church on Sunday morning and said our goodbyes.
One more story. On Saturday evening we went to dinner at Chick-Fil-A. They had this great play area for toddlers - age 3 and under. Before we took the girls to play, we noticed two ladies drop off two small girls at the play area and leave to get their food. The girls had to have been Elizabeth and Molly's age. And of course there is a sign that said that children must be accompanied by a parent. So we kept an eye on everyone by default, because we were there. Elizabeth started playing with the older girl and introduced her to Greg as they came down the slide. "Hey, this is my Daddy!", Elizabeth said. The girl then turned to me and said (in a heavy southern drawl) "My daddy is in jail. The state police took him away." Oh my gosh, it took all I had not to laugh because I couldn't believe I was in West Virginia with a little girl saying that to me in her southern accent. Poor thing, really. But Greg and I got a kick out of it! I had to tease Heather about that later. We even have a picture of all the girls playing...
2 comments:
What a crazy night! Glad it all worked out.
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