A Day To Remember

My husband is so sweet! A couple of days ago this is what I found carefully placed on my stove top. Of course the card was not opened at the time. You have to understand the story behind it. We keep this trophy on the shelf above our cupboards in the kitchen all the time, because he won this the day we met.

His cousin Michelle is the one that introduced us. Michelle and I were travel agents and we worked at Endless Vacation Travel. I was supposed to meet him in December when she had to go to a ship inspection in Miami. Wade lived in Miami at the time, and we were going to meet up with Michelle's cousin and go visit the keys. Well I had a chance to go to the Canary Islands and I've been on so many ship inspections (I started out in the cruise department). We knew we would get several opportunities to see him at another time. We were single and got a chance to travel often. Our first trip together was a quick last minute trip to Copenhagen over Thanksgiving. We are so different, but we travel well together. Now with Michelle, when we get back from a trip her stories are much more ...shall I say embellished than my were. Sometimes I would just look at her after we were telling about our trip an say..."wow that happened? How'd I miss that?"

Anyway, back to how we met. I was not at all excited about this. Michelle had different taste in guys than I did. Did I mention how different we were? She said "Hey how would you like to meet my cousin Wade? " Okay...yeah...they grew up about an hour north of Grand Rapids out in the country (not that is a bad thing) and meet her 32 year old cousin that has never been married before (of course either had I). Our next trip was to Merritt Island in Florida. We flew into Orlando for one night and were there the same time Wade was in Lake Alfred for a jet ski race. We were supposed to meet up for drinks Friday night, but it rained so much a the power went out and (before cell phones) the phones were out. Whew! got out of that one.

We did meet up at the race Feb 11, 1990. He was so nice, he explained all about how the jet ski races worked. Ran off to hold a fellow racers ski for a start. Came back to chat some more, even though this girl who had a crush on him kept bugging him! It was a nice time and I enjoyed our short visit. Later when we were back in Michigan he called his cousin to meet him at Friday's oh and does your friend want to come along too? We went to meet up with him and ended up going north to go snow skiing, and we got to know each other better. After that Michelle and I flew down to Sarasota where he moved and went to other races. I eventually moved to the area and stayed with my aunt and uncle who lived there too until I got a job, we started dating, and the rest as they say is history! This is the trophy that he won on the day we met!

Thanks for staying with me on our story of how we met 20 years ago. We were married in July 1993. Michelle was in our wedding. He is always so good about remembering anniversaries of all sorts of things, (a lot better than I am). I am so bad at that.

This is shortly after we met and I believe I moved down here then. I moved here in Sept 1990.

This is at a race in Sanford Florida oh so long ago! We went all over when he was racing. Now he gets to travel often while building race skis for other racers.

I just wanted to share this with all of you, I thought it is perfect for Valentine's Day!