February 28th
The LONGEST day of my life!
When Neeter came out of the bedroom that morning, I looked at her and smiled, “At this time tomorrow, we’ll be up and on our way to the airport!” We’d been doing this for over a week now, “A week from now we’ll be driving to Denver,” or “A week from now, we’ll be over the Pacific Ocean,” or something similar.
I dressed myself and went out to start the pickup and Durango. Later, I drove the pickup over to the S&T Head End and took the company car to work. Susan Wilson was the first person I saw, “9 more hours and we’re on our way to Denver,” I said, looking at my watch.
“It’s going to be a long day,” she replied. She had no idea. I spent most of the day thinking to myself, “6 hours, 12 minutes, and 27 seconds,” then later “3 hours, 48 minutes, 43 seconds,” etc.
At 4:45, I was just beginning to think that the day would be fairly uneventful. At 4:50, the phone rang. “Crap!” I thought to myself. “S&T, this is James,” I said politely.
“Yeah,” the voice on the phone said, “I can’t get my Internet Explorer to work.” I glanced over at the caller ID, thinking that the voice sounded funny, like someone trying to disguise their voice. The ID read “Unavailable.”
I suppressed a laugh and replied, “Is it just your Internet Explorer, or can you not get anything to work?”
“When I double-click on Internet Explorer, it doesn’t do anything,” they replied. I figured it was one of my “friends,” or even a co-worker, messing with me, but I suppressed the urge to tell him where to stick his Internet Explorer, just in case it WAS an actual customer, or possibly the General Manager of S&T playing a prank on me.
I quickly thought of an out, “What’s your e-mail address?” I asked. It’s a common question to ask, so that I can look up their information in our Helpdesk database, but I figured it would trip up someone just messing with me.
The laughter on the other end of the phone gave me my reply. Toby had gotten a call from Susan and told him to call with a computer problem shortly before 5, just to get me riled up. She’ll get hers!!!!
At 5:00, I dropped the company car off at the Head End and drove home. My father was waiting there to send us off in style with a final farewell, a bon voyage, etc. We loaded the bags in the car and headed out of town.
The hard (and long) part of the day was over…..We were officially on our honeymoon!!!! We drove the 4-1/2 hours to Denver and made our way to Embassy Suites.
We were in the penthouse!!! OK…..We were on the top floor anyway. Neeter and I lugged the luggage into the room and began to do our final organization. I made my way down to the bar and brought back a couple of Bud Lights. I signed into their “high speed” wireless and connected to my VPN at home. I thought it was going pretty slow, so I closed it and did a speed test. I got a blazing 42K download and upload!!! My computer just couldn’t keep up with that blinding speed. Sarcasm is just plain wasted on the internet.
I gave up and decided to call it a night. I called the front desk and asked for a 7:00 Central time wakeup call. That gave us an hour to get ready to catch the 8:00 shuttle to the airport to get checked in for our 10:16 flight out. The next several days were going to be exciting and I wanted to be rested.
Sorry, no pictures were taken during this day of the trip.