Finally...Our Wedding

The time has come for our big day.  Mike and I have known each other for over 40 years and we have been together for 20 but it's a 365/24/7 kind of together so we can probably add another 10 years to those numbers, lol.  We have always introduced ourselves as married as the only difference was the actual paper and the legalities of it.  Mike promised that we would do the real thing by the time he was 60.  So this is how we made our wedding plans.

While sitting in an rv park last January Mike said I should look online for places to get married.  He was leaning towards a cruise wedding that we could get married by the captain.  Well we must have gotten that from tv, lol, because that's not the way it happens.  You actually get married at the dock and not on the ship.  Ok that didn't sound like fun so I did some more searching.  Of course we wanted it to be unique because Mike and I just don't do things the "normal" way.  After some searching I found that we could get married(say our vows) in a helicopter over Niagara Falls. Hmm...that sounded pretty cool so I made the arrangements.  Mike picked the date of 7-7-17 so he wouldn't forget it ha, ha.

I booked the wedding using The Falls Wedding Chapel.  They would make the arrangements for the minister, the helicopter, and the pictures.  Then I made reservations for the second hotel and dinner for our wedding night.  At the time we also had Niki(our pug) to worry about.  Niki stayed at a kennel one time when she was very young and she did not do well there.  That was the last time for Niki and kennels.  I found someone outside of Buffalo to watch her in her house for 2 nights.  This lady also had a pug so I thought it would be a fun time for Niki.  I used a site called Rover.com which is a fantastic solution to find caring people to watch your pets and it is also very reasonable.  Sadly this did not happen as Niki passed away in April but I highly recommend that site.  So now all of our arrangements are made.

Flash forward 6 months and we are ready for our trip north.  We have to be in NY state 48 hours before the ceremony to get our license.  Since it is a holiday week and we don't want any problems with our plans we decided to leave on Monday July 3.  We drove through Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.  We stayed over night in PA and then early Tuesday we went to the small town where we would get our license.  We drove through early and planned to go back after breakfast.  We found a nice spot on Lake Erie at a marina to relax until we could check into our campground for that night.  Then we got the "call" from one of Mike's sisters on Long Island.  His father had a heart attack and was admitted to the critical care unit at the hospital.  We didn't know what to do.  Was he going to be ok?  How bad was he?  At that point we were 8 hours away on the 4th of July.  Not a good time to try to get through NYC.  We talked to another sister and also his mother.  In the end we decided we had to go.  We hit a parade on our way to NY and luckily not too much traffic.  We made it to the hospital by 8:30 that night.

Mike's father was sedated and had a breathing tube doing his breathing for him.  I postponed the wedding plans.  After a few days of watch with all the siblings things "sounded" better so I made new plans for 7-17-17.  In the midst of all of this everyone felt bad about our wedding plans so we decided to go from the hospital and at least get our marriage license on our original day of 7-7-17.

On July 13 Mike's father died.  He was 87 and had a full life.  Out of respect for my mother-in-law I won't go into details.

We postponed the wedding for the second time.  We set the new date for 7-25-17.  Not quite the same but it will have to do.  We stayed with Mike's mother for 3 weeks to help her out and just be with her after Mike's father died.


With license in hand we can now get married.  We didn't have quite the same excitement as before but it was still going to be our day.

We checked into the first hotel on the 24th.  We spent the night and got ready for our wedding the next day.  The only good thing about Mike's father passing is Mike had to buy a suit.  So he wore a suit for our wedding and looked quite handsome:)

We met Sally at the chapel inside the hotel.  She and her husband took care of the paperwork and off we went to the helicopter pad.

Here we met the minister.  He told us how it would happen.  We would get into the helicopter, put our headsets on and we would say our vows almost immediately as we were right at the falls.  Then we could enjoy the rest of the ride.

Here were are with the minister:

Mike took the pictures from the helicopter:

And now we are Mr. and Mrs:)

Pictures after the helicopter:

We had a 20 year trial run and we are still doing great.  That says a lot in itself, lol.  We must be meant to be together.  We always thought we were soul mates:)


Next up the beginning of a new adventure.