Melissa went to Georgia, we knew it was going to be rough, in theory we weren't going to see each other again until Thanksgiving, that's when her first vacation was going to be.
Melissa can fill you in on the details of training, sufficed to say it was really hard, emotionally more than anything being 3000 miles from home. Two weeks after she left on a Saturday she was experiencing the 'Day From Hell.' Physical training with a guy she said was like the T-1000 in his unstoppableness and mercilessness. Those are my words, but that's what she meant. I was in San Diego at the Shredd Dog surf camp that day... (Melissa: Let's just say I wondered if having my face in the mud all day was really worth it. The next day the only thing that didn't hurt was the hair on my head).
We wrote letters and talked on the phone a lot, really got to know each other. I started to learn Spanish and Pete (my employer at the time) started to make noise about going to New York to build a house or two. Melissa found a cool Baptist Church on the 'happening' place around her Georgia home, a nice traditional Church on St. Simons Island with good music and good preaching. A month or so after she got there she also found an unlisted Starbucks at the resort on St. Simons. It was a minimalist little stand, but it saw so little business that Melissa convinced the girl who worked there to make her a java chip frappacino (the favorite drink of Melissa Bravo). Everytime the Starbuck's girl saw her she would start making her frappacino.
The hurricanes came and a few times she almost had to evacuate a few times. Her phone didn't get any reception in her room so she only talked to me outside and she wasn't going outside during the hurricanes, so I had to wait a long time sometimes to see if she was OK. A few times water started leaking into her room on the 3rd floor.
Pete and I ended up going to New York, and I had scheduled out a weeks vacation to go visit the Peach State, and Melissa decided to come visit me in New York on her first 2 day weekend in three months. So after my first week in New York I drove down from upstate to the City and picked her up. We spent the weekend with my aunt down close to NYC, we visited Connecticut (don't ask me...), went to the very first legitimate mall she had seen in months, saw some New England sights, went to church and almost went to some kind of apple festival. On Sunday before her flight home we went to New York City on Polish day, this says Pete, is where they march down the streets in the wrong direction. It was hard to get around, but we did, we had New York pizza, saw 5th Ave. and even found the worlds greatest Macy's. I'm rather surprised that I was able to extract her before her flight. On our way out, once we found our way through the marching Polish, I was driving down a one way street that was really more of an alleyway with cars parked on each side. I was going thirty down this street, and it frequently crossed major streets where people were crossing - even on red. A guy got behind me and right up on my tail and started honking at me because I wasn't going fast enough. Crazy. He passed me by going in the little strip where cars were parked. Crazy.
Two weeks later I went down to Georgia, which for the record, is a lot warmer than New York. I came in to Jacksonville so we went to the downtown there, I kind of wanted to go to a place called Ruth's Chris steakhouse, best steaks ever, but only knew that it was on the river. We parked at the Riverwalk, figuring that we could find it from there. We found a Hooters, but it turns out that Ruth's Chris is on the other side of the river. We had dinner at a nice place anyway, right there looking out over the water. Melissa had warned me about service in the south and sure enough, dinner took some two and a half hours. After we ate we went to the square there on the Riverwalk and enjoyed some live blues for a bit.
Over the weekend we went to Anastasia State Park, where there are some nice beaches, only it rained 20 minutes after we got there, so we went to St. Augustine, home of the oldest fort in the country, there was free admission and they fired a cannon into the bay. It was pretty cool. We explored St. Simon's island the next day and I enjoyed some of the most delicious corn bread I've ever had. We went to Savannah the day after that and explored the historic (read: tourist) district. We got lost on the way out and ended up in some fairly frightening neighborhoods.
Melissa had to go to training for the rest of the week, so we stayed local, I explored Brunswick and the Wal-Mart. I went running near the hotel and almost stepped on a snake the first day. That was fun. I watched a lot of Magnum P.I. too.
The next weekend we drove an hour to the very south east part of Georgia and took a ferry out to Cumberland Island, which is an island where the Carnagies used to have an estate, so there is a giant ruined mansion and other estate things, stables, trellises, storehouses, etc. There are also lots of wild horses around, we saw some of those, but no alligators. I never see alligators, it's so disappointing. I had to go back to New York the next day, which was unfortunate, but it was a good trip.
She came and visited me again in New York when it was getting pretty cold, they lost her luggage and got it back just in time for her to go home. That trip we went to Saratoga Springs and saw some of the coolest houses I've ever seen, we had our very first dinner and a movie date, went to Johnny Rocket's and saw The Incredibles. We also went to downtown Albany on Sunday morning before her flight out and it was the most empty place I've ever seen in my life, in the whole downtown building, the whole city center, all the businesses around the Egg, even McDonalds and Starbucks were closed, there wasn't a person on the streets for a couple of miles in any direction. It was very strange. I saw Melissa on her way and started waiting for Thanksgiving.
We both came home for Thanksgiving and spent a good time together with Melissa's family and mine.
I couldn't afford a Christmas flight so I spent Christmas with my aunt Ann in Greenwood Lake, which was fun save the fact that back in California Melissa went to the Emergency room with a bad rash, sore throat, trouble breathing, horrible headaches, and exhaustion. On Christmas day. Turned out that some antibiotics they had given her in Georgia had reacted with her mononucleosis and it had gotten pretty bad. For the record Julia, this was the third time your state tried to kill my fiance. It tried to kill me once too, a tree almost fell on Daniel and I one night when we were camping in 2003.
She was in the hospital for almost a week, they almost delayed her graduation for three months and at one point they thought they saw a shadow in her lung. What the crap? Anyway, I flew down to Georgia to take care of her for a few days in very early January, we met in Jacksonville yet again and this time didn't quite have as much fun, what with Melissa thinking she was going to die and everything.
I went back to New York again only for a couple of weeks before Melissa graduated and we made our glorious return to California.
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