Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Getting married: Ladies and gentlemen, we have a groom.

I know, the basic premise is that if there is a wedding there must naturally be a bride and a groom...or two brides or two grooms.  A marriage requires two people, and until two days ago I was the only one with a ticket to Minnesota. Since this is where the wedding is being held it was definitely a priority to get Leif a ticket to Minnesota, post haste.

We have been working to get the necessary block of funds together to get him a ticket. Through the generosity of several people we were finally able to book his flight on Monday. Thank you to them for making this possible.

The process of booking a flight online should qualify as premarital counseling. If two people can huddle over the same computer for hours, first finding the cheapest (yet not longest) flight on the planet and then get it booked before 1) they change the price or 2) it becomes unavailable, without slapping each others hands away from the keyboard or something more extreme then they can manage just about any obstacle that comes their way. I'd like to think with grace and style, but honestly I'm happy with surviving the bumps. I don't care what it looks like anymore.

It was difficult. We had to try a bunch of different combinations of arrival and departure dates to find the cheapest ones. You'd think that checking the +/- 3 days button would work, but trust me, it does't always find what you're looking for. We found what we wanted, then had the frustration of watching the website claim that every ticket we tried to book was unavailable. Which was an out and out lie as it was right there on the screen just a few minutes earlier as available. Just for fun (I'm sure) after a couple of tries it told us that the price had changed for this ticket, leading us to believe that the ticket was available if we wanted to pay the extra money. To which we said "Yeah, sure, of course!" Well, actually we hit a button that said we would like to continue with this booking, but we did it with great enthusiasm. Then it told us the flight was unavailable. See how much fun this is?

Being the internet savvy people that we are we changed the dates slightly, found something for the same money as we had before, and before anything could change we put all the info in and hit Book. We sort of held our breath as we watched the little dots make their circle telling us that the computer was thinking about our request and would give us an answer when it was damn well ready to. And a miracle happened, right there in our kitchen. He has a ticket to Minnesota on January 10.

I'm thinking of asking at the marriage license offices if we can use this experience as premarital counseling and get the $60 knocked off the price of the license. I don't have much hope, but it's worth a shot. So if you had any doubts before, you can put them away now. He's coming. I'll be there. Happiness will abound.

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