by ·0 Comments

With the wedding fast approaching and the cake plans fully covered, we had just small bits and pieces till the wedding itself. The main thing was that Heidi was going to keep the tradition of not seeing me till the wedding from the night before. I wasn’t all that happy about it, since my friends were working pretty much the day off and the day before, so I settled in to an night alone on the couch. My last night as a legally single man, spent on the couch, watching tv, with Heidi’s teddy bear Bigfoot for company (yeah I am sure you have seen a few photos of the culprit floating around). Thrilling!

Wedding morning rolls around and I spend the morning taking a run around the streets to clear my head. A quick oatmeal breakfast and it was time to get the cake transported. I barely had time to breat with that done to head over to a friends place to iron my shirt (since we don’t have an iron) and then by the time that was finished I had under 90 minutes before I had to get some flowers, head home and get ready for the wedding and be out of the house. Heidi wanted to use our apartment as the staging ground for getting ready, fine with me but traffic on the 405 and a failed attempt at getting some flowers meant I had to rush to get ready 🙁

I made it out of the house by the assigned time and headed over to the Museum of flight. I was able to calm myself down by meeting the designer of the 747 and the Boeing Chief Pilot who were there to give a talk on 747 day. Unfortunately they wouldn’t have been able to be present for the wedding (how amazing would it be to have the designer of the 747, sign my wedding certificate as a Witness!), but just getting a chance to meet them was truly an honor.

I was able to take that time to shock a few friends who didn’t know about the wedding as here I was at the Museum in full suit & tie. Truly loved shocking people with the whole “I’m getting married in the first 747”, lots of fun! After the talk it was only a short time before Heidi arrived and we were off to get our photos taken. We wanted to do our photos before the ceremony due to light. The moment I saw Heidi, I was gobsmacked…. I had never seen her look so beautiful in my life. I wanted to take in that moment forever! With the wedding photos about to get started, I had not expected someone else to show up but an Aviation Journalist colleague of mine, Jeremy turned up. It was a shock to him as I said to him “What are you doing here” “Shooting a wedding for USA Today” “O, I guess that’s my wedding you’re shooting!”

We spent the next while getting photos taken all over the museum, with planes, with statues, goofy, serious, everything you would expect. We slowly and progressively moved our way from one side of the museum to the plane itself. The museum shut at 5pm and once that was done, we had free reign of everything in the Air Park and RA001 for an hour. We had a blast getting some photos, but there was serious business. We got set up on the main deck, in the nose of the aircraft and the ceremony began once Heidi and worked her way up the stairs:

The wedding went off greatly, we read our vows (which we had written obviously) from Safety cards (we couldn’t find any 747 ones, so went with what we had, two Southwest 737 cards) and we signed our marriage certificate on the original design model of the 747. After some more photos of everyone and our first as a married couple, we headed away from the museum to Dinner at a restaurant in Columbia City. Nothing huge just a small family style dinner to celebrate the day. Cake was had, food was consumed (which for Me & Heidi was some of the first that day) and much fun was conducted. Heidi & I finished our wedding night off by walking across the street for ice cream at Full Tilt, because nothing says the end of our day like Ice Cream.

Getting Married in a 747

by ·0 Comments

One of the things that I decided with our wedding was to continue a tradition (well kind of) that my father did when he got married. Some of you know that my father cooks a lot. One of his most known food items, is “the cake”. He makes the best fruit cake (or as some people call it, rum cake). When he got engaged he had made his usual cake and had transported it to Sydney where he was visiting my mother. When they got engaged, they decided to keep that piece of fruit cake and use it as the Top tier of their wedding cake. So what did I do with our cake? Rather than make one tier… how about the whole cake! It would save us money, we could have EXACTLY what we wanted and I could be happy with what we achieved.

We wanted at least 2 tiers, but wanted to have a cake that we could freeze the top tier (per that tradition) till our first anniversary. So that meant a multiple tier cake. I wasn’t sure if an 8″ cake and a 6″ cake would be enough, so we ended up with 3 tiers, just to make sure we had enough cake. We were only having a small “reception” (more on that in the next installment) but I wanted to make sure everyone had some cake, and some to take home as well. It may have caused many, many “discussions” with Heidi, but in the end we both were happy.

The cake was decided on a Lemon Buttermilk cake (we found the recipe online actually) and with a filling of Lemon Curd. The frosting was the part that we always went backwards and forwards over. Unfortunately Heidi doesn’t like fondant, so it meant that we had to have a soft frosted cake. I wanted to make sure I had a frosting that wasn’t to heavy with the cake, but Heidi wanted full buttercream, something that could be quite heavy.

We tested it several times over to find the right one. In the end with the wedding cake, there was a total of 10 cakes made…. that’s right, 10 sponges. 2 double layer test cakes (so that is 4 cakes right there) plus the actual cake itself. It was a lot of cake! Each cake had almost a half dozen eggs, so much flour, butter, sugar. O lordy just thinking about it scares me!

But let’s look at some of the pictures:

From Life in Seattle 2014
From Life in Seattle 2014

That’s what my kitchen looked like after the first set of 8 sponges being made that day!

From Life in Seattle 2014

Thankfully I have a nice high powered stand mixer!

From Life in Seattle 2014

8 Sponges, 6 for the wedding cake and 2 for the final test cake

From Life in Seattle 2014

The Final test cake, testing 2 different kinds of frosting, mere days before the wedding

From Life in Seattle 2014

Starting assembly

From Life in Seattle 2014

First Tier Complete

From Life in Seattle 2014

Lots of Frosting!

From Life in Seattle 2014

2nd tier ready to go up

From Life in Seattle 2014

Starting the frosting process

From Life in Seattle 2014

Final Tier Up

From Life in Seattle 2014

The Final Cake!

So the day of the wedding came around, I had already spent two full days stressing over the cake (don’t even start me on almost covering the kitchen in frosting due to the mixer almost overflowing with Swiss Meringue Frosting) and I had one last thing to do. I had hoped that it would be an easy day, just drive the cake from Renton to Columbia City to the restaurant and it would all be ok…. Nope! I got the cake ready to travel and since I spent the night alone (again, more in the next piece) I had to get it over to the restaurant alone and as easily as possible.

From Life in Seattle 2014

It rained unfortunately that morning so here I am stressing to make sure the cake has no marks, or any problems while I transport it down 4 floors to the car park, then on wet, crappy Seattle roads drive it across town. Joy of Joys! I had barely gotten the cake into the car when this:

From Life in Seattle 2014

The seatbelt slipped out of my hands and caught the top of the cake. I was swearing, cussing, all kinds of bad things, but thankfully I still had frosting and had it in a container in the freezer. I ran upstairs and grabbed it, along with a pallette knife and off to the restaurant. Once I got there I fixed it, and I also left the extra frosting there, just in case. In the end I did have to make a few touch ups to the cake right when they bought the cake out of the kitchen as unfortunately the staff didn’t treat it that kindly.

But the cake was a success, everyone liked it and it was a good choice. We still have the top tier in our freezer and it will sit there for a solid year. I don’t regret making the cake, but to anyone contemplating making a wedding cake…. DON’T DO IT!

by ·2 Comments

So I am sure you may have seen all the stuff on Facebook or Twitter or AirlineReporter.com about our wedding. Well they were just little teasers about it all. Let’s look at how it all went down, It may take a couple of installments but hey it will be worth it.

Heidi & I both agreed that we wanted to get married quickly for a few different reasons.

1. We wanted to make sure that our lives together were protected in case something bad happened
2. We didn’t want to cause any problems with Heidi’s Uni Work. She is in the final year of her Masters and with an upcoming Student Teaching and also the Holiday period at her Job, things could get messy.
3. Why wait?
4. Profit…? (sorry it always seems to be the way to end these kinds of lists).

So we wanted to get married soon, within a two week period. The first thing we did, before anything else (even before I had technically asked Heidi’s dad for permission) was get our marriage license. The state of Washington requires a 72 hour waiting period once this is done, so we just had to do it soon so that we didn’t have complications later. Then the biggest decision was where to get married. Neither of us wanted a big wedding. Did we go down the line of getting married in a park somewhere or the “beach”. Would we be better off getting married in the courthouse? So many options. We started looking around and the Courthouse thing just didn’t seem right, although the easiest, it was a hassle to arrange. Plus I had a friend who could officiate, so that could take away some of the hassles. But where to get married then? King County required a permit to use a park or beach etc for something like that. The prices ranged to as much as $400! All of that for what would be 15-20 minutes at most. PASS!

I had chatted with my friends at Future of Flight jokingly and they suggested if it wasn’t many people, we could get married on the Stratodeck. Sounded good, but I no longer lived up north. Being a south King County person, Everett was a long way to go! So in a random joking kind of way, after having read some stuff about the refurbishment of the 747 at the Museum of Flight being finished, I suggested we get married under it. Heidi being ever so smart said “What if it Rains?” We live in Seattle, it is October, it will probably rain the day of our wedding. Yeah… Very good point. Heidi then solved the problem herself “What if we get married inside the plane?”. I thought to myself “This is why I am marrying this girl!”

So the next morning we were over by Boeing Field. I was off getting a couple of photos of a plane departing BFI:

From Seattle Spotting 2014

That should keep the avgeeks happy.

So Heidi & I popped over to the Museum of Flight to see a contact I have at the Museum. While talking we talked about the 747 and then i dropped the ball. “How about a Wedding Inside the 747?” “Sure, do you know someone who would? “How about us?”. Seeing our contact’s face light up, the gears in her head just turning, it was glorious. We had to keep it quiet as it is a small space and couldn’t do much. So the plans were on, we were super excited at the possibilities of what it could bring, but mainly it was such an iconic venue, how could you not want to do it!

by ·0 Comments

Last night driving home across the 520 Bridge in the storm that was raging was pretty scary. The gale force winds were whipping waves up over the floating bridge and crashing down on the road deck. What is normally a 50 mile an hour bridge, was down to 20 or 30 just so you could see things. It was pretty scary, but then so was having to tell Heidi’s father that I wanted to marry her.

This little conversation with Heidi’s dad still had to happen. It was something we had always discussed as Heidi had said that if I was ever to marry her, she would expect to get her fathers blessing first. So we were not officially engaged till I had that conversation. I was dreading this moment, because it is a moment that any man will dread. Having to look the father of the bride in the eyes and say “I would like to marry your daughter”.

Now Heidi’s dad is not that scary. It wasn’t going to pull a gun on me, or threaten me, he just isn’t that person. That didn’t mean that I was as nervous as anything. What if he said no? What if he said that he did not think I was good enough. I don’t know why I was worried because both of Heidi’s parents gave me their blessing but it still had me worried.

Some things in life are scary. I look at life every day and wonder just how I get through things. I was scared to make the step on the plane a couple of years back. I was scared the day I married Heidi. I wanted to make sure that everything I was doing was right. Well in life you can never be certain of anything. You just have to do what is right, do what you think is right. Take the good with the bad and go for it head first.

At least that is how I look at it!

by ·1 Comment

The wedding happened on Saturday and went off great. Heidi & I will update the blog more over the coming days/weeks with more information on that (yes Heidi will now be writing and apparently editing all my poor spelling/grammar mistakes). But let’s take a look back at to where this all began. Heidi & I had planned a trip to Spokane at the end of September. The day we were due to head off was a bit of a tumultuous one at work. I had some discussion with management that caused an unexpected hump.

On our way out to Spokane, Heidi & I discussed our future, we wanted to secure our future better together, I had been planning on asking Heidi to marry me for a couple of months now. I was going to do it while in Japan, either after dinner at the Park Hyatt Tokyo (where we were staying for a couple of nights) or on the flight home from Japan. After discussons on the drive out, we decided it was time we just went and did it. In essence it went with Heidi saying “Lets get married” with me saying “If it is what you want”.

In the end I officially asked Heidi to marry me at the Ryegrass Rest Area. A couple of hours outside Seattle on the I90 heading East (the Eastbound side for anyone who already knows it). Not exactly thrilling but with two people who had been in deep discussion, (possibly in tears along the way) it was more about the question than the location. Not having a ring, Heidi’s original ring was my black ring that I purchased in China a few years ago. This served as her first temporary engagement ring.

The weekend was a really great one visiting Heidi’s friend Jessica. We had a blast doing the Fall things like visiting harvest festival stuff, eating pumpkin this & that. Eating plenty of foods that were bad for us & so much more. I enjoyed running by the river every morning and Heidi ended up winning a decent chunk of cash at the casino (which was about the only good thing about the casino).

We had some fun trying to get Heidi her 2nd temporary engagement ring, and I will let her tell that story. Heidi’s actual engagement & wedding rings are being shipped over from Australia. They were originally from my Grandmother and keeping a historic ring like that in the family is something we both wanted and had discussed for some time. The ring itself unfortunately couldn’t make it over for the wedding (due to hold backs) but we should have it soon enough.

Our trip back from Spokane had a last minute visit, to a place a little more scenic, by the river in Spokane Valley. It was here we got a few photos of the proper on one knee proposal. Although this was the 3rd time that weekend that I had asked Heidi to marry me (the 2nd time was by Spokane Falls after a morning run) this one was photographed by Jessica. I think I will keep this one as a better reminder of when we got engaged.

As we drove home we had plenty of time to discuss more of what was coming. I had some time off work over the coming weeks so it meant that we could move fast in getting things done. We wanted to get married quickly, the sooner the better for both of us. With Heidi returning to University the next day, it meant stress was coming, so the sooner we got things out of the way, the less hassle it would be on Heidi. Also it meant that our futures would be secure. One bit of advice from a friend was “don’t screw around, just get it done, for both your sake”. So that’s what we planned to do. We had also decided at this point to keep things quiet, and under our hat. Keeping things on the down low meant that we were not going to be inundated with people wanting their say etc. The wedding should be about us, not everyone else right?

So I will leave this installment there and let Heidi fill in the gaps about the ring experience (it is a bit of a laugh). More to come!

Spokane Trip

by ·0 Comments

Today is a special day. I have been fairly quiet online the last few weeks for a good reason, it is for today.  Today I marry the love of my life, my best friend, the person I can spend countless amounts of time with. Yes that is right, I am marrying Heidi today.

From that very first date back in January in a small little cafe in Bellevue to today’s wedding, my life is 1000 times different to how i expected it. I came into this year with so many goals, both travel & personal. But the only one I completed was going on a date. I am surprised that one date led to so many more.

From our second & third dates, my life was destined to be changed. Heidi’s passion & lust for life just opened my eyes to so much. We have so much in common but yet we have so many differences that we always challenge each other & find new things all the time.

As I stand in front of Heidi today, I say how my heart feels & promise to be with her for the rest of my life. I know that as I look in her eyes, I want to spend my life in her arms, with her for every moment. Heidi, I love you.

Over the next week of so you will see more details of the wedding. It is going to be unique, 100% like the both of us!