Travelogue: Omaha

I flew back from Florida to Houston on Wednesday. I had an hour to wander aimlessly through Houston Intercontinental and then I boarded a plane to Omaha, Nebraska. Boyfriend's best friends were getting married, and they had done him the great honor of asking him to be their best man. He loves them both to death, and he was very excited about the wedding.

Before the wedding Boyfriend wanted to show me Omaha's zoo, which competes with San Diego's to be the best in the country. It was a huge zoo, we barely covered a third of it in one day. We saw a small fuzzy creature that made me miss my little sister and how she would squeak over it:
Omaha has a new butterfly exhibit that is amazing, there were butterflies and moths everywhere, sitting on flowers, fluttering about our heads, having dogfights, strafing each other, and taking a breather on a convenient tree.

Now, I have heard of Tornado Alley and understood that this was a problem in the Midwest, and I understood that at the time, I was in the Midwest, but this didn't really come together for me until Boyfriend and I drove to his friends' house and halfway there he looked out the window and remarked, fairly calmly in my opinion, that we should get there quickly as it looked like tornado weather. The sky, which was already cloudy and threatening rain, began to get a greenish tinge I found extremely alarming. I have been in the same county as a tornado before, when I was 6 or so, driving to Florida with my parents. We pulled over the side of the road and they tried not to panic in front of the kids. Not exactly an auspicious introduction to them.

Just as we arrived at the friends' house, it began to hail. This storm was not joking with this hail, it wasn't just thinking about hailing, or tossing a few ice cubes down. This was serious, golf-ball sized, hope-you-parked-in-the-garage, chunks of ice being thrown from the inexplicably green sky! We ran down to the basement, where everyone else watched tv and I panicked to myself. Apparently imminent death from above is common enough to not warrant interrupting the movie there.

Luckily we survived the night, and the next which featured tornado sirens at 3 am which were pretty ineffective, as I was the only one who woke up and I had no idea what they were or what to do about them, or if I was in fact actually awake or just dreaming of panic.

But we survived long enough to make it to the wedding!


The bride was beyond beautiful, the ceremony gorgeous, the pastor funny and fairly brief, Boyfriend managed to not lose the rings, much to his relief, and everyone was happy and crying at the same time, as they do at weddings.

On the way to the reception we stopped at a lushly green park for more pictures. (Girl note: my dress was blowing in the breeze, it didn't hang like that constantly. I got so many compliments on it!)
The reception food was good, Boyfriend's best man speech was perfect, very funny and he made fun of the bride and groom just enough, the bride's father's speech made everyone in the room cry, and I added two more people to whom I can say, "I danced at your wedding!"

Travelogue: Florida

I got to go to Florida on a business trip! It was my first work-related travel, and I enjoyed it very much. The strangest part about it was staying in a hotel room by myself, I've never done that before.

The hotel I stayed in was very nice, very family-oriented actually (the hotel where the conference was held was all booked up by the time I went to make my reservation) but the first room they gave me was on the second floor, which was accessed by an exterior elevator next to a hallway with a lot of bends and nooks, and was the last room down a fairly long, shadowed hallway. When I got to the door I discovered the hallway did not actually end at my door, it made a sharp right immediately afterwards and connected to other side of the hotel. It seemed like there were entirely too many places for people to hide (rapist nooks, as I call them) on my approach to my room, and I knew I would be coming back to it after dark each night, so just to save myself the worry I went back and requested a room change. The front desk was very nice, they hadn't really thought about where the room was, so they moved me to a room on the first floor in the middle of the hallway, where I could park 5 feet from my door and see all around me. The hotel was very nice and all, they had a security guard at the entrance to the hotel, but just for peace of mind and paranoia it was well worth the move.

The other major benefit to business travel in Florida is that I got to see my Uncle and Aunt! I went to school in Daytona, and I used to visit them at least a few times a semester, and I haven't been back and spent time with them since the year after I graduated, so I enjoyed catching up with them. Perhaps because they live so far away from where I grew up that they weren't as used to me being a child, and that I saw them more as I was growing independent and getting used to this whole being-a-grown-up thing, they were the first adults in my family whom I felt like an adult around. It was really nice to see them, we played dress-up (I'm all grown-up, yup yup) with the clothes they wear to the Scottish/Irish festivals they go to frequently. This is my Uncle and I preparing to defend our lands:
And my Aunt and Uncle being silly:
My Uncle has that social gene that my sisters have and that I seem to have misplaced, the one that allows him to have a conversation with anyone, anywhere. He's genuinely interested in everyone he meets, what their background is, where they've lived, what they've done in their lives. He has also rather inexplicably turned into a redneck despite growing up 3 blocks from where I did!

Driving back from their house in the dark along the same highway I used to drive back to school on brought back lots of college memories. I lived as a child in Jersey and as an adult in Texas, but I did a lot of my growing-up in Florida.