Happy Anniversary to us, and I will blog when I get back!

For all my regular visitors and friends, and any curious first-timers:

Tomorrow, the 14th, is our 31st anniversary!!

I never wrote about how we met, did I?

He was a country boy, in the Air Force, when I, a college senior, met him. He was three weeks from being discharged when he asked me to dance at the NCO's club that night. I was with my parents (had no date, but loved going to NCO club with them... loved to dance with the GI's... I was 20 at the time and looking for someone to carry me away)... it was the only way to get into the NCO club if you didn't have a GI of your own.

Mom and dad were regular attendees of the NCO club... mom could outdance me any Friday night... she could even outdance my dad. Sometimes my dad would quit dancing, and sit down to take a break, but mom would just keep dancing. She was a better partier than I, having a lust for life that most of us only wish for. Actually, at 75 years old, she still has a lust for life today. Dad quietly stepped out four years ago to take that long break we desire when we are tired and hurt from the pains of living, and is resting in peaceful eternity now. God bless my dad. He tried to keep up with mom, he really did.

However, essential to this story is a beginning that began before we first laid eyes (hands, lips, etc!) on each other. It began five years earlier, when I was a high school senior (1970) living in Georgia, and I first travelled through with my girlfriend and her family to NC, and fell in love with the Appalachian mountains. My heart did something that day that I can't explain, but I was left feeling quite certain that NC was the state I would return to one day. I had goose bumps, and tears in my eyes as I came to recognize the view in the mountains as being "home" for me.

Then in 1973, Dodge showed off its newest model of cars, the Challenger. I saw a picture of it in a newspaper insert. It was Plum metallic, and it was beautiful in my eyes. I kept the picture and told everyone that was the car of my dreams.

I was a college student between 1971 and 1975... and just before I graduated from the University of Georgia, I met Steve. He was on leave, just back from TDY in Turkey, and I was spending the weekend home with my family (I had 6 brothers and sisters).

Here's what Steve had going for him that night we met:

1) He spoke well of his siblings... he had six also!   

2) He owned a metallic Blue 1973 Challenger, which was close enough to purple to win me over!  

3) He was from North Carolina.

4) I liked him. Very much.

Not one to ignore all the signs that were pointing the way so clearly for me, I made ample opportunities for he and I to get to know each other, even though he had to return to NC while I was still in school in Athens, Georgia. Since he owned a car, and I didn't, he made several trips to visit me during those first months before we got married.

To make a long story short, we both fell in love, he with my incredible cuteness and many other things too numerous to mention, and I with his intelligence, good looks, his Carolina accent, his car, his vision for our future, and his brothers (his sister too). We married June 14, 1975 in North Carolina in the yard of his brother and sister-in-law, now my family, by a Baptist minister, in the North Carolina foothills.

His family is my family, and I miss those days we had when we were so very close, like best friends. We still are, but we don't do things together like we did twenty to thirty years ago. We live so far apart now, and we've all been raising our children. But we love each other and when we are together, it all comes back just like we were never apart.

We leave first thing in the morning for DisneyWorld. I'm pretty sure we'll blend in with all the real kids there.

I know you all have wished for me to have a fun time and a safe trip. We will have fun, no doubt. I hope that those of you who pray will pray that we have safe passage to and from Orlando. More than anything, I want to make it home again. Lots of work stillleft to do!

I will be taking pictures. Maybe not lots of them, but enough that I can make a journal entry with photos to show what we did. I'll be asking strangers to take our picture together from time to time.

I won't be able to make any journal entries unless there is a computer I can use at the motel.

So, I guess when I get back, I'm going to see at least 200 journal entry alerts.... I had forgotten about that one... that's a lot of journals to read when I get back. So, if I don't respond by commenting in your journals for a few weeks, just remember, I won't be back for ten days, and then give me some time to get back into a routine.

THank you all for your support these past several months. You have been wonderful people, and your words touch my heart. I hope you have a good two weeks in your own lives. I will be back!

Love,

Bea