Happy Birthday to Me!

Chris spent the last week preparing my birthday surprise. Not very subtly either! Phone calls right in front of me, where I know they are discussing it, but can’t get enough detail to figure out what’s going on. Bastard! He knows I hate waiting on surprises, so of course he delights in surprising me!

He did give me one too many hints though. I did guess where we were going – wasn’t absolutely sure, but I figured it was a good bet. Still, he did very well at keeping the secret. From me anyway. Everyone else knew what it was. The guys were all over for Monday night football last week, giving me shit about it! Bastards!

Saturday morning we headed downtown for my very first legal train ride! We were calling it my very first train ride, and then I remembered “Oh yeah, Steph and I, we used to hop trains.” (Remember the body we found?) Freight trains, not passenger trains, and I’m not sure hanging off the back of a train really counts….

We hopped on the Heartland Flier from OKC to Ft. Worth. There were 4 stops between here and there. The only one we could get off for a smoke break was at Ardmore – a whole 2 minutes! I swear I thought I’d just smoked a really good joint I was head-rushing so badly! I’m not sure what time we arrived in Ft. Worth, but we got off the train expecting to hop in a cab for a short trip to the hotel and then off to explore downtown Ft. Worth.

The first glitch came when we found that there were no cabs waiting in front of the train station. Apparently the train was about an hour late coming in and none of the taxi’s had waited. We got a security guard to call us a taxi who arrived pretty quickly. And then we drove and drove and drove some more. Chris and I are looking at each other going I thought our hotel was downtown. Turns out there’s a Cherry St. downtown and a Cherry Lane about 20 miles away from downtown and we ended up on Cherry Lane!

Normally I make all of our travel arrangements, but since this was a surprise for me, Chris had his Dad make the arrangements. What is truly hilarious about this situation is that Ted is the most anal person ever about double-checking and making sure everything is exactly how you want it before you ever go anywhere. He always creates a trip itinerary as soon as he decides he’s going somewhere and updates it as soon as 1 detail changes. “Oh, we’re leaving at 4:05 instead of 4:00?” New itinerary. So he was horrified when Chris called him to harass him about the mix up.

Originally, Chris had planned that we would go to the Jazz Festival being held downtown and we’d hit a fairly nice restaurant for dinner. Instead we decided that it would be cheaper to have something delivered, so we ordered Fuddrucker’s. I’d never eaten there before and it’s not bad. The onion rings aren’t all that great, but everything else was good.

Sunday we walked over to IHOP for breakfast and then called a cab to come and take us downtown. The original plan had been to leave our bags at the hotel until we were ready to go back to the train station, but obviously that wasn’t going to work now, so we found out that the bus station had lockers we could use. An hour and a half after calling 2 different cab companies, one finally showed up, and we headed for the station. Chris ran in to get a locker while I sat in the cab watching the rain just pour out of the sky. After about 10 minutes, this guy walks up to the cab and tells us that a bus is going to be pulling up in a few minutes, how long are we going to be? Right about then, I look out the back window and see Chris dashing across the street after some guy, they turn around and go back inside. WTF?

Turns out the lockers are computerized. You put your bag in, then go to the key pad and enter the locker number, insert some money, and it’s supposed to lock the locker and give you a receipt. Except when the guy Chris chased down entered in his locker number, it locked our locker. And we didn’t have a receipt. So Chris had to find a manager to open the locker, chase down the other guy for the second time (after which he “loaned” him one of our umbrellas) and we finally got the receipt for our locker.

The other guy was waiting on the train and was going to get a drink. It was really pouring by this time, so Chris loaned him one of our umbrellas, cuz the guy was going to be right back. Except he wasn’t, and there was a cab (actually in front of the station!!!), so we hopped in it and headed to the cultural district, in the rain, with one small umbrella.

We went to the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame and the Ft. Worth Museum of Science and History, and then back to the train station for the trip home.

All in all, I had a wonderful time. Chris was a bit upset – first the hotel, then we watched the OU game (we won’t talk about that, other than to say that the refs were blind and cheated), and then all the cab issues that we had. But I enjoyed every minute of the time I got to spend with my wonderful husband who planned such a wonderful surprise for me.

Now, I just have to figure out what I’m going to do for his birthday!