Honeymoon - Nearly 41 Years Ago

In just a few days Mike and I will celebrate the 41^st anniversary of the date we said “I DO”.  It seems like it was yesterday when we got married.  I imagine you are wondering how it can feel like yesterday when we have had children and grandchildren.  My minds-eye feels like it was yesterday. Anyway, because we are a few days away from our anniversary, I began thinking about our honeymoon.  If you know me, you know I am a planner. I love a vacation and I like to pack as much into it as I can.  Relaxing is not on my schedule.  I haven’t changed over the years and one of my daughters, I am not saying which one, thinks my expectations are too high.  Well, a honeymoon should have lots of things planned.  I planned and then God laughed and said “not so fast”

We were married on May 14, 1971, a Friday evening.  It was a beautiful day.  Warm, sunny, fabulous.  My childhood friend Sandra had flown out from California to be one of my 5 bridesmaids.  My best friend, Beth, was my maid of honor.  It was a fabulous day – at least it should have been.  I got to the church so early that I went upstairs to the kitchen and helped make sandwiches for the reception.  I found out that Mike had tried to work that day but mid-day someone found him losing his lunch so they sent him home.  There were several other things that happened as well but a girl has to save something only she and her husband know about.  All of this and we hadn’t even gotten to the ceremony yet.

Mike decided that driving his little Triumph TR6 was not a good idea.  He was concerned one of his friends might have a way of following him to our “special” location for the night so he exchanged his car with my Grandpa’s car and drove that car to the wedding.  When the reception ended we took Grandpa’s old car back to exchange it for our car.  We found 3 flat tires on our car.  Now at this time of the night, and on your wedding night, you really are NOT worried about flat tires.  We decided to take Grandpa’s car to the hotel and begin our honeymoon and tackle the tires on Saturday.  We had a beautiful suite at a brand new hotel.  Mike had reserved the honeymoon suite but it wasn’t ready yet so we stayed in the Master suite.  It had 3 beautiful rooms and a large bathtub. 

On Saturday I had planned we would leave first thing in the morning.  Three flat tires prevented that from happening.  We left at 2 in the afternoon.  My plan was we were having dinner at Niagra Falls.  That didn’t happen.  Mike had the tires fixed and we headed east out of Muskegon.  We stopped at a great place in East Lansing called “Best Steak House”  I had been there many times and really liked it.  While we were in the restaurant having a late, very late, lunch one of our tires decided to go flat for the second time.  It turned out that the person who flattened our tires (GREG) added a special treat.  He unscrewed the valve stem so the tire wouldn’t hold air.  Now we were even further behind.  We finally make it into Canada and we headed toward our destination.  Now anyone else would have stopped at one of the hotels along the way but not me, we were headed to Niagra Falls and I was determined to spend the night in Niagra Falls.  We made it there at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning.  We checked into the Sheraton Foxhead and it was right at the falls.  As we checked in the lady at registration said there were two rooms left to choose from.  Mike said he would park the car and I could choose the room.  I think he regrets it to this day.  One room had a queen size bed and faced the alley.  The other room was not really a sleeping room but more of a meeting room.  It had a pull out sofa and faced the falls.  I had planned on us having a view of the falls and so of course I chose the room that didn’t have a bed for night two of our honeymoon.  We slept until about 10 o’clock Sunday morning and then had breakfast, looked at the falls, went to the “House of Wax” and headed to our next destination – Boston.  I had never been there before so I was excited and couldn’t wait to get there.  Boston was a long way from Niagra Falls but I knew we could make it before we went to bed that night.  Mike drew the line in the sand and said we would not be driving to Boston, he wanted a honeymoon and we would be stopping for the night and complete the drive to Boston on Monday.  We stopped in Utica NY at a Holiday Inn.  They gave us a beautiful room facing the alley (God, you are so funny).  We discovered a dirty pair of someone else’s socks under our bed the next morning.  We got ready to go to dinner and had to pass the pool to get to the restaurant.  The pool smelled so bad and was filthy since it was May and the pool wasn’t ready for use.  So now we are on to Tuesday morning and we took a leisurely drive to Boston.  My Aunt Connie and Uncle Bill had invited us to stay with them.  We had taken our entire Grooms cake with us in the Triumph TR6 to Boston so we could share it with them since they couldn’t join us at the wedding.  They had a beautiful home not far off the interstate in Dedham.  It had a wonderful enclosed side porch.  Aunt Connie gave us a choice of staying on the porch or staying in their room.  Mike said the porch would be wonderful.  I about froze to death.  We decided perhaps switching rooms the next night was the best idea.  Remember, it was our honeymoon. We spent our day in Boston doing some sightseeing and visiting my cousin Sharon and her children Janet, Paul and Kurt.  It was a great day.  We had a wonderful dinner with my Aunt and Uncle that evening.  Now it was time to go to bed again.  We retreated to my Aunt and Uncle’s room and found they had an old iron bed.  The kind that makes a noise if you make a move.  I am sure you get the picture.  Again, God you are sooo funny.  We left the next morning for New York City, another place I had only dreamed of seeing.  As we approached New York we found out one interesting fact that made it impossible to visit the city.  New York City was 3 weeks into a garbage strike and you could smell the city from a long way off.  This caused us to move on toward Pennsylvania.  We had planned to visit my Great-Aunt Madge at the nursing home where she lived in Quarryville, Pennsylvania.  This was close to Lancaster PA, Amish country so we headed to Lancaster.  I must say the three days in Lancaster were the best of the honeymoon.  Does that sound like it was pure joy?  Nope, we had one laugh after another.

We decided to drive out to see Madge so we could check out the countryside.  We saw a fabulous Amish restaurant we wanted to take my Aunt to for dinner.  Here is the problem with that plan – we had a two seater Triumph TR6 and we would need to transport three people to dinner.  She was in a nursing home and she didn’t have a car.  Mike dropped me off at the restaurant and then drove to pick up Madge and then joined me for dinner.  Of course that meant that after dinner it was the same thing in reverse.  It still was a wonderful night.  The next day we went to see the Amish sights and had a wonderful dinner together.  It was our first day together outside of a car since the wedding.  We got back to our hotel late that evening and were watching the 11:00 news from our bed.  They announced that there was a little girl in Philadelphia that needed a special type of blood.  Mike had the special type of blood so we got dressed and went to the local hospital, as instructed on the news, to give lifesaving blood to this little girl.  They told us we would need to drive into Philadelphia.  We stopped at a police station to get directions and started on our way to Philly.  We arrived at the hospital just after 2:00 a.m.  They stopped taking blood at midnight and apologized to us and thanked Mike but we now had to drive back to Lancaster.  It was well after 5 a.m. when we got back to our hotel. 

The next day we checked out of our hotel and drove out to say good-bye to Aunt Madge.  She was so excited to have someone visit her.  She left us for a minute to go get her bird book to show us information on the various birds she kept watch for.  When she came back she had the bird book and a box she wanted us to take back to Michigan.  The box contained something like 5000 postcards of the Sea of Galilee taken from one of her pictures during her visit to Israel decades before our visit to her in 1971.  When Mike said yes she disappeared again and came back with two more boxes.  One was a box filled with all of her slides and the other her slide projector.   She wanted them to go back to my Grandparents home.  Aunt Madge didn’t want anyone to use these items so she took the bulb out of the projector just to preserve it from use.  She then said she would be right back and returned with a movie screen.  Really?  A movie screen in a Triumph TR-6?  There was no way to make that happen.

I hope you enjoyed reading a little bit about one of the worst honeymoons of all time.  As you can tell, a bad honeymoon does not lead to a bad marriage – May 14 will be our 41^st anniversary. 

FAMILY REUNION - HANKS/GARVEY

I came from a really large family.  My mother had 3 sisters and 7 brothers.  When the boys began having children of their own, they produced large families.  My Grandfather, John Hanks, married my Grandmother, Flossie Garvey.  That meant I had plenty of Aunts and Uncles but even more cousins.  At one point I think there were 52 of us first cousins.  Through the years I have lost track of some of my cousins, which is disheartening.  I use to love to watch my Mom put her hands up and use her fingers to tell the birth order of her brothers and sisters.  It was something she could do until her last days on earth. 

Every year there is a fantastic family reunion that is called the Hanks/Garvey Reunion.  While my Mom’s family was large, there was an added bonus to our family.  My Grandfather’s sister, Margaret, married my Grandmother’s brother, Earl.  They also had several children who grew up and had several children.  I wish I could remember the count of that part of the family.  Their children were what we all called “Double Cousins”.  That was how the reunion began.  The reunion began in 1928.  When I was a child I looked forward to reunion day every year. Who could forget the endless tables of food, the games of horseshoes played by the Uncles, the trips into the lake, the excitement of the day?  My sister, Lisa, was only two and a half weeks old when she attended her first reunion.  One of my Mom’s brothers, Bill (John), lived in Boston and he would even bring his two girls, Sharon and Jill.  Aunt Madge, another sister of my Grandfather, was a retired missionary living in Pennsylvania and she NEVER missed a reunion.

Since I moved to Florida, I have only been to the reunion 7 or 8 times in 30 years.  About 10 years ago I went to the reunion with my mother.  It was held at a park on Mona Lake in Muskegon, Michigan – the same lake the reunion was held at in 1928.  While there use to be hundreds (at least it felt that way when I was a child) at the reunion, there were only about 40-45 people.  In 2009 my entire family returned to Muskegon for the reunion.  My Mom passed away in December 2008 and her brother Bill (John) passed away on Easter 2009. Bill’s daughter Sharon passed away the week of the reunion in 2008 so none of us went in 2008. My husband, our daughters and our grandchildren along with Jane, Ron and Lisa went that year.  My niece, D’Ann, joined us along with my sister Ranae.   I took CDs of the entire lot of family photo’s my Mom had saved throughout her 91 years.   I scanned them and made them available to all of the family.  There were about 30-35 people in addition to our part of the family that came that year.  Last year I returned to the reunion in Muskegon.  My cousin, Robin, plus her husband, son and daughter-in-law were there from Florida. I flew in on Friday and out on Monday.  It was worth it but very few people attend anymore.  At the reunion last year I found out one of my cousins lives about an hour south of my Tampa home.  We visited on the phone after I returned to Tampa and we met for the first time since we were teenagers.  The reunion is really worth our time.  My cousin, Penny, has given so many of us information about our roots.  Penny has traced our family on the Hanks side all of the way back and beyond Abraham Lincoln.  Yes, we are related to Abraham Lincoln through his Mother. 

Uncles Harold and Laurence - July 2011

My cousin, Jo Ellen, works so hard to make a great day for everyone.  She sends out invitations to families month’s ahead so everyone can put it on their calendar for the last Sunday in July.  Still, the numbers dwindle.  Out of 11 children my Grandparents had, there are only 2 living.  It is so sad.  There is only one aunt still alive, my Aunt Joan.  She was married to Mom’s youngest brother, Milburn.  That is on the Hanks side.  I didn’t see anyone from the Garvey side.  I know there are still family members on that side but they must not have been able to attend.

My family won’t be able to attend the reunion this year because we are increasing our family.  We have a granddaughter due at the same time of the reunion.  I will miss it this year.  My husband, Mike and our grandson, Holden, have been the last 3 or 4 years in a row.  We all would love to be there.  When we went to the reunion in 2009 we rented a house in Muskegon for a week.  Our family has said it is the best vacation ever.  They loved seeing Lake Michigan.  They enjoyed seeing all of the homes their parents had lived in while growing up and the schools we attended.  We were only 4 houses away from the school Holly and Missy went to before they moved to Florida.  Even they had memories of Muskegon. 

If you are part of my family as a cousin or a double cousin, please consider taking the last Sunday of July and returning to your roots.  There are several others who would like to get reacquainted and you will be welcomed with open arms.  Remember to bring a dish to pass and your own table service.  Every year there is an auction of white elephant items.  I think that is Holden’s favorite part of the reunion.  He loves to bid on items.

Look for us to be back in 2013 for the family reunion.  If you need more information, please post a comment below and I will answer you.