All Of A Sudden, Wedding Planning Doesn't Seem That Hard

I am afraid of flying. Actually, that's not quite correct. I have no problem with flying, it's the fear of crashing that makes my pulse quicken when I get on an airplane. (People always respond to this by assuring me that car crashes are much more prevalent and should be a bigger concern than planes, which helps exactly 0.00% - there may be thousands more car crashes than plane crashes, but at least I have a good chance of surviving a car crash). It doesn't keep me from traveling by air, but my imagination tends to run wild at the slightest hint of turbulence.

Hilary is the same way, if not worse. She too will never pass on a plane flight because of her fears, but has a habit of nearly breaking my fingers with her death grip during takeoffs and landings.

We have flown together many times over the last three years, without incident, until this past Friday as we made our way back to Virginia Beach to do some serious wedding planning.

Though every flight from Atlanta to Newport News had been canceled during the day, our evening flight got out reasonably on time (reasonably on time being within 90 minutes of scheduled departure). The flight was mostly uneventful until it was time to make our descent.

The fog was thick, and getting thicker (and Leon's getting laaaaarger), and we couldn't see anything as we heard the landing gear go down. At this point we were tense, but we assumed everything was fine in the cockpit. Right as we were about to touch down though (or so it seemed), the plane suddenly pitched straight up in the air and we began to climb very quickly at a steep angle. Needless to say, I was contemplating needing a new pair of undershorts while Hilary's eyes were about to pop out of her skull, cartoon-style (see right).

Now, this maneuver may be well within the skill set of your average pilot, but we had never seen anything like it and were terrified. The plane continued to ascend till we leveled off above the clouds, and everyone on the plane just kinda looked around at each other, trying to get a handle on what just happened (Were we ok? Had we just narrowly averted disaster?). Finally, after about 10-15 minutes, the captain came on the intercom to explain that they couldn't see the runway so they had to bring the plane back up (oh good, for a moment I thought it might be something serious). He said this very calmly and rationally, which either meant that A) everything was fine and we had nothing to worry about, or B) he'd spent the last 13 minutes in a state of catatonic shock and had only recently been able to regain the ability to speak to finally tell us WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON!

The pilot made it out to be a routine matter and said we were going to go back around for another pass at it (yippee!). And so we did, and as we prepared to touch down again...the same thing happened. Again, not so fun.

This time, the pilot only waited 7-8 minutes to announce that this little exercise wasn't really working out as planned (ya think?), and as a result they were diverting us to Richmond. Fine. They could have re-routed us to Fallujah, and as long as we got to plant two feet on the ground, we'd have been quite content.

We finally landed in Richmond (hurray for Richmond!), and were bused over to Newport News, arriving only 3 hours after originally scheduled.

We ended up getting a lot done over the next two days. We hired a florist, a videographer, picked out invitations and a wedding band for Hilary, and did a tasting for the meal at the reception (my advice? Go for the chicken, it was scrumptious.). All in all a good weekend, a get-sh*t-done weekend, near-death experience (?) aside. We even got back on a plane to fly to Atlanta Sunday night, and I'm happy to report all was back to normal. And by normal of course I mean our flight was delayed by two hours.

But hey, at least we stuck the landing on the first try.