Honeymoon Picture

The picture you see on the right is the only picture I have of my honeymoon. Instead of a picture of my new wife and I in an exotic location, I have a picture of my very good friend and the baby of a different friend. Neither my wife or I are in the picture. Neither of us took the picture. I was waiting for my turn to hold the baby and my wife was 1500 miles away. It was a very untraditional honeymoon.
Like many young people, time off work was hard to come by when we got married. For my wife. I on the other hand had recently finished working 15 hours a day 7 days a week in a dusty town in North Texas. I had accumulated a month of vacation time and my boss insisted that I use it. Now, I could have stayed at home and cleaned the house and cooked dinner for my new wife. At the time I wasn't very good at cooking, and I've never been very good at cleaning, and I've never been very good at just sitting still for longer than about 3 days. Frankly, it would have sucked to spend the whole month sitting at home not matter how much I loved my new wife. With her permission I drove north and picked up my friend. We visited other friends and their baby. At the time they were living almost a mile from the nearest road in an 80 year old cabin in the woods with no water or electricity. It was pretty cool. From there we headed west to the Black Hills of South Dakota. We visited the Needles, Mount Rushmore, and Jewel Cave. My wife would have loved Jewel Cave. Too bad she wasn't there. It was cool. We had a really good time.
All of this happened a little over 11 years ago and my wife and I have gotten a lot of mileage from the story. People ask us if we have a secret to a happy marriage and we reply, in unison, "separate honeymoons". We're about to fix that. We're going to New York. This will be my second honeymoon and my wife's first. Oddly enough, we're off to visit other friends and their baby. It seems that if you want us to visit, having a baby dramatically ups your odds. The last trip my wife and I took with just the two of us was when we got married. I'm very excited to do it again.