Everyone has at least one unforgettable experience, whether it's a vacation or party, horrible or euphoric, something's they will never forget. I can ironically say that I've had many of these experiences, this one being on the funnier side of all my stories. Since my mom has the best view for this story it will be told in her perspective, that being said, lets get started.

When we moved into our new home, John and I were not married, and John had very bad experiences with his previous marriage so he told me that you know even though he loved me we would never get married. And I was okay with that. However I told him when he said that to me, “look I’m gonna tell you right now, if you ask me to marry you I’m gonna say yes, so you better be sure if you ever ask that question.” Thus time went on and we moved into the house and John had to go in for surgery on his knee. When we got to the hospital they asked him for next of kin and they asked him to put down who to contact, should anything happen and he looked at me and put my name down. When they asked him what the relation was, I guess he felt bad and said, “well she’s my fiancé” and again it didn’t mean anything. We also had been talking about the legal problems of not being married, what could happen, what rights we would have, and what rights we wouldn’t have. Therefore I guess that was on his mind. Well he goes in for surgery, everything went fine, and since it was day surgery I took him home the same day. I put him into bed and I sat next to him and I put the television on. The 2 of us were sitting watching TV -he was still pretty loopy from the medication from the anesthesia- and as were watching TV, all of a sudden he turns to me and says “let’s get married!”

So I looked at him and said “what?”

“Let’s get married!”

“Okay honey yea we’ll get married go to sleep now”

“No no no, I wanna get married, let’s get married”

“Okay… we’ll get married, you go to sleep now.”

That was it, I didn’t think anything of it. The next morning I made breakfast for him and we were sitting at the table. I looked over at him and asked if he remembered what he said to me last night or rather what he asked me.

He goes “yea”

“Really? You remember what you asked?”

“Yeah, I asked you to marry me.”

“Okay, um, you do realize this is your one chance to get out of it because you were drugged up.”

“No no no, I wanna get married.”

Subsequently here my boyfriend goes from never ever ever ever ever wanting to get married to let’s get married now. So I told him “okay, let’s get married, I told you I’d say yes, we’re getting married!”; Now thinking about when we should get married, I realized we had a trip next year booked to Jamaica, we can get married then, it's already booked we just have to make a few extra arrangements and I thought it would be nice. However he protested on how he wanted to get married right away and kept saying that Jamaica was too far away. So my boyfriend who never ever ever ever wanted to get married again now wanted to get married yesterday. We decided that we’ll get married at the courthouse legal because it’s a lot of red tape to get married in a different country. We’ll get married here and then have a nice, actual renewal ceremony down in Jamaica. Our family and friends will be there, I’ll be in a dress and John will be in a tuxedo. A few weeks later we got married at the courthouse and I began to make plans for the ceremony in Jamaica. Jamaica was booked from June 27^th, a Saturday, to the end of the week, so I called the hotel and told them that there’s going to be some changes. I told them that I want to change my vacation into a renewal of my wedding vows.

They said “oh no problem.”

Apparently no problem means ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, but don’t worry about it.’ Now I spoke to the wedding planner and we decided that John and I would get married on the beach at 5 o’ clock on July 1^st. Which was a Wednesday and everything was all set, great. Now I have to call the travel agent to change my flight arrangements because now all of my documentation is in my new married name and my reservations are in my old name. I call the travel agent and tell her that I want to change my documents to my new name since I just got married. My new name is Tosh so I needed her to change it to that from Lisk. They said, “oh no problem… but it’s going to cost you $300 to switch your plane tickets”. I asked why would it cost me that much to change them, I’m just changing the name. They told me since it’s a different name that it’s considered a transfer. Since I didn’t want to pay $300, I enquired what they can do and they told me to bring my marriage certificate and they’ll let me on the plane with a different name. Okay, no problem. I also made arrangements with the hotel to add an addition room for my daughter and niece, since now we were bringing my niece to come and take care of my daughter while we were on our technical marriage and honeymoon (we’d have two rooms). Great, no problem, everything’s wonderful. Until we get to the airport, the day we are going to leave. I was ready, I had my plane ticket, driver’s license, passport, marriage certificate with my new name, everything was right, and everything was great. Then we walked up to the counter to talk to the booking agent, so we go up to the airline booking agent and I explained the whole thing. I showed her my new name, all the documentation required, including my marriage certificate proving that my name has changed. She looked at everything and then told me that she can’t let me on the plane. I asked her “what do you mean you can’t let me on the plane?” There’s my husband, my daughter, my niece, there’s all our luggage, we’re going on that plane, here’s all my documentation.” Well she responded by saying that because my maiden name is not the same as my old name. (You see this was my second marriage and my marriage certificate had my first married name on it up at the top. Unfortunately the brilliant ticket agent never looked further than the top of the certificate because my second married name was listed at the bottom, but she never looked that far. By now I’m panicking so I didn’t even look.) Then I realized that I had my old license, it has the same picture on it so I showed it to the agent with my new license that has the new name on it. Same picture, same person, it’s a legal document. She then looked at me with a blank stare and told me that she can’t accept your old license because it’s expired. Needless to say I was a bit upset now, so I stated to her that she doesn’t understand, I’m having this ceremony, all my family is going to be there, you need to let me on that plane. Finally after 45 minutes of arguing with this woman, she throws her arms up in disgust and says “fine, you deal with the security agent.” Fine, I will. As we go up to security, I’m ready for him, I have all my documents ready. He must’ve seen the look on my face because as I approached him, he looked at me and kind of smirked because I’m sure he’s had irate people before. I said look, I just spent 45 minutes arguing with the ticket agent about my 2 names and I explain the whole thing to him. He looked at me again and must have seen the desperation on my face and felt pity for me because he told me to just go. I thought to myself, ‘yay I won, one victory.’ You’ll understand why that victory was so important later because there were so many losses on the way. We get on the plane and everything is happy, we were on our way to Jamaica, we were going to have fun, our family and friends are going to meet us down there.

Now we traveled on Saturday, so on the plane, since Jamaica is a different country they have you fill out customs forms, on the plane they made an announcement saying place fill out customs forms, one per family. My niece had a different last name, so I’ll fill one out for her and I’ll fill one out for our family. We fill out the two forms, we land in Jamaica and get off the plane. Then we get to customs and we see this line that looks like the line for the flume ride at great adventure in the middle of July. I’m thinking, well we have no choice, we have to wait on this line, but as we’re approaching the line, we hear on the loud speaker “Please fill out your customs forms one per adult”. Let’s get another customs form, we have three adults, and we’ll be ready when we get up there. We spend almost an hour, felt like three days, but around an hour. We get to the counter, we talk to the person and he tells us we need another customs form for the last person because now it’s one per person. I’m losing another battle… okay. He tells me after I ask if I have to wait on that line again, “oh no problem, no, you fill it out and you come back to me.” So I get the customs form and fill it out for my daughter and I go back to the counter, but my counter agent is gone. I inquired to the next agent about where he went, apparently he went on a break, but he’ll be back in 20 minutes. Now do I wait the 20 minutes for my agent to come back, do I cut in front of the hour and a half line of hostile people looking at me with daggers, or do I get on the back of the line and wait again? I guess I’ll wait the 20 minutes. We wait until the counter agent comes back and tell him we are ready now. He asks why we waited for him and so I said I wasn’t going to cut in front of all those people that look like they want to murder me. Finally we make it through customs forms, now we have to go gather our luggage. By the time we get down to the luggage pick up obviously everyone on our flight has retrieved their luggage and there’s only a few bags left waiting there. Originally we had checked four bags, as we are walking towards the luggage I see ours, there’s three of our bags, one’s missing. The one that’s missing had my wedding gown, John’s tuxedo, and the girls’ dresses, so we go over to the luggage agent. They look up on the computer and say “oh that bag never made your flight.” What do you mean it didn’t make the flight? Did it go have coffee? Did it need lunch? How could it have not made the flight it was with the other three? They said that they don’t know but that they will get it on the next flight out, which is tomorrow morning at 10 A.M. Sunday at 10:00 A.M. they told us that they will deliver it to the hotel, no problem. Now we have to get to the hotel. We find our transportation, we get on the bus, and luckily the hotel was fairly close to the airport. Thus making it a short ride and as we pull up to the absolutely beautiful hotel, an angel of mercy is standing there with Bahama-mamas. I get off the bus and asked her if I can have two of them please, and she says “No problem! You can have as many as you want” I ask If I can take three because I really need them and she allowed me to take the three. Now there I am, like a little hoarder, with my drinks.

And finally, some advice, never udder the words "what else could possibly go wrong" because then we walked up to the reception counter of lost hopes and dreams.