We got married in the summer of 1996. Our wedding was scheduled for a couple of weeks before the beginning of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games here in Atlanta, so our plan all along was to get married, take a day or two off, go back to work for bit, and then leave for our honeymoon about the time the Olympics started to avoid the crowds and inconvenience.
Originally, we were planning a trip to England, Scotland, and Ireland. The funds for this were supposed to come from my share of the proceeds of the sale of the company I worked for – complicated scenario, but basically the owner committed to giving the long-term employees who had shares and options in the company a cut of his proceeds once he was able to exercise his options in the acquiring company. Unfortunately, the new company dragged out the transfer process and basically stalled for months, during which time the stock price dropped from an all-time high to a point not far above the strike price for his options. When the time came to make travel arrangements for the honeymoon, this was all still up in the air, with no resolution in sight. The president of the acquiring company offered me a loan from the company for the amount I was expecting, to be paid back out of my cut, but I (wisely) decided I wasn’t comfortable with that, and declined (had I accepted, I’d have ended up still owing the company thousands once everything was settled). So we decided we would just make a driving trip up and down the eastern states.
We got married in Asheville, NC, and spent our wedding night at the Grove Park Inn, courtesy of one of my wife’s friends. We then headed back to Atlanta for a week or so, then back up to Asheville. From there, we drove up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Roanoke, VA the first day, spent the next couple days doing “Virginia Stuff” – visiting a cave near Staunton, Charlottesville and Monticello, etc. We stayed in Harrisonburg our last night in VA, and the next morning used the pregnancy test someone had given us as a gag wedding gift to find out she was, in fact, pregnant (probably conceived on our wedding night!). Went hiking in Shenandoah National Park that day, and my wife discovered that even that early in her pregnancy it was sapping her strength to a surprising degree – we hiked a mile or so downhill (with vertical drop of several hundred feet) to a waterfall, and I thought I was never going to get her out of there again.
We then headed on up I-81 into Pennsylvania to Harrisburg, where we took in a Harrisburg Senators game at what was then RiverSide Park, on City Island; Vladimir Guerrero was in right field for the Senators that night, and it was a treat to watch baserunners throw out an anchor and stop short at second on anything hit out there as he gunned the ball into third. Next day we did a tour of the Hershey factory complex in Hershey, PA, then headed north again. We made it to Cooperstown, NY in time to walk around a bit and grab a room at the Lake Front Motel, only a block from the Baseball Hall of Fame. Spent most of the next day at the HOF, followed by shopping and walking around in Cooperstown, then drove as far as Poughkeepsie, NY and crashed there for the night. We spent the next three days staying at a hotel in White Plains (my wife was too cheap to pay Manhattan hotel rates) and taking the train into NYC each day, doing the usual NY tourist stuff – Broadway, Times Square, Met, Jewish Museum, World Trade Center, etc. Then we headed down to the Washington, DC area and did the usual tourist stuff there, as well as visiting some of my wife’s relatives. Finally we headed back home – almost exactly two weeks after we started.
