We left Seat­tle on Jet Blue’s red eye flight — leav­ing 12 p.m., arriv­ing New York at 8 a.m. Jet Blue is a pretty good air­line, and it was the first time I’d flown them. Fly­ing is still a cat­tle call, but at least Jet Blue made some of those igno­minies more bear­able. Jus­tine took an Ambien and slept OK, and I, even with my sleep­ing super pow­ers didn’t get a ton of rest. Her dad picked us up early and we spent day nap­ping, loung­ing and gen­er­ally try­ing to feel human again. On Fri­day morn­ing, I’d got­ten up at 5:15 a.m. for work, so my day was spent try­ing to act nor­mal. I’m always work­ing on a sleep deficit, so two days with lit­tle to no sleep made the day feel like one heck of a hang­over. I have decided that I’d rather be hung-over than oper­at­ing on 4 hours of sleep (6 hrs doesn’t bother me though.)

That night we went to her par­ents beach cabana at their beach club (which is dif­fer­ent than a coun­try club, in that a coun­try club is NOT on the water and usu­ally has water.) We had a small get together with two of her high school friend, their hus­bands, her par­ents and two of their best friends. It was great to talk to these peo­ple that I’d heard so much about, and it was equally great to get a glimpse into the coun­try club part of her per­son­al­ity. It’s long buried, but as with my biker child­hood, it’s always there. I found out the phrase “Darien Bitch” to be a very bad com­bi­na­tion of words. Very, very bad. I shall never put them next to each other in a sen­tence unless it’s gang­ster talk, such as “my ho is from Darien, bitch!”

The next day we went into the city for the day. The inten­tion was to see the sights, then meet her fam­ily for din­ner. Once we got into the city, we headed to MoMa. It was one of the things that I’ve not man­aged to do in the few times I was in New York, or at least the top of my lengthy list. Luck­ily, it was the same day as the Gay Pride parade. The parade was very close to MoMa (and runs what appears to be a very large part of the city.) One thing that struck me was how diverse the crowd was, or rather how not diverse. It appeared to be largely white, afflu­ent peo­ple. Granted the part we were at was in the mid­dle of Man­hat­tan, as opposed to Green­wich Vil­lage. I think it would be safe to say it was a more “straight” crowd than we’d see in Seattle.

Because of the parade, MoMa was not very crowded, which was my biggest fear. Even though in New York, I detest crowds. I bought a mem­ber­ship because it only cost me a few $$ more when I fig­ure the tax ben­e­fits. Moma was great — it was every­thing I’d thought it would be — i saw many great paint­ings I’d only read about, includ­ing many that had lived on my com­puter desk­top for months at a time. The cur­rent tour­ing exhibit was for Richard Serra, an artist that worked with metal and other indus­trial mate­ri­als. One of the exhibits was a room con­tain­ing four large sheets of metal at 90 degrees to each other, mak­ing an X of sorts, with each leg of the X in on cor­ner of the room. I sup­pose I’m just not savvy enough to appre­ci­ate his com­men­tary on the per­ma­nence of mate­ri­als of mod­ern life, or of his com­ments on the futil­ity of the work­ing man, or what­ever, but really, WTF?

After we left we went to Times Square, which was inter­est­ing enough, then took a cab to Ground Zero. I didn’t know what to expect, or how I’d respond, but I didn’t grieve for it as I thought I might have. After­wards we went to Trin­ity Church, then to Wall Street. Across from the NYSE was Town Hall, where George Wash­ing­ton was sworn in as Pres­i­dent — I found that to be an unex­pected treat, a sur­prise of knowl­edge I wasn’t expect­ing. Oddly enough, there was a group of mid­west­ern tourist that held hands out­side of the NYSE and said a prayer. I would have expected that at ground Zero, but the NYSE? I sup­pose it’s one way to get your stock price up.

After that we went to the iconic J&R Music world to buy a wire­less router for her father’s com­puter. Frankly I was under­whelmed buy the place. Fry’s still has my heart. We walked to East Vil­lage for din­ner, which was quite nice. Her father drove us all back to CT, with three dif­fer­ent women telling him three dif­fer­ent ways to go. We drove by the (or a) Bada Bing, but I wasn’t allowed to stop, nor would they drop me off until the next morning.

The next morn­ing we lounged about the house (and slept) heav­ily. Later Jus­tine drove me around the Darien show­ing me where she grew up, and stopped hat­ing me for putting the words Darien & Bitch together. Once back at her house I took a nap in the sun while her Jus­tine and her mother chat­ted. Appar­ently my ran­dom twitch­ing while I fall asleep wor­ried her mother — she asked in all seri­ous­ness if I was OK. Her sis­ter drove us to the air­port (thanks Alexa), despite Van Wyck traf­fic. We got there think­ing we had a 6:30 flight, when in fact it was a 8:30 flight., and our tick­ets were for Mr. Cain Greg and Ms. Divett Jus­tine. Luck­ily the tick­et­ing agent noticed the prob­lem while search­ing for us in the data­base and escorted us through secu­rity. While wait­ing to get our seat assign­ments, Jus­tine said “Look at that woman.’ It was my first look at our viking over­lords. She was about 6’2″, lean and well mus­cled, blonde as can be and gor­geous. I am glad Jus­tine pointed her out to me, as I would have never seen her oth­er­wise. I’ve only got eyes for my betrothed. This woman was a graph­i­cal exam­ple of how the Vikings were able to con­quer so much of the world, from Ire­land to Kiev. Ice­land is, after all, the land of Vikings — it was set­tled by vikings in 870 A.D. and never con­quered by oth­ers. Frankly, after see­ing this woman, I wel­come our Viking Overlords.

As we were wait­ing for our flight, we found that a party of some­thing like 60 high school kids were going to be on our flight. Yikes, yikes and more yikes. It ended up not being a big issue, as they were very well behaved and/or slept the entire flight. This was one half of a group of musi­cians play­ing abroad in France, and later, Bel­gium. The first girl to sit by us was very well spo­ken, and the source of all of our infor­ma­tion. She swapped seats with some­one trav­el­ing with her group so she could sit buy some boy she had a crush on. The sec­ond boy played the bas­soon , and he slept the entire meal. I’m glad he slept the entire meal, as Jus­tine spent quite a bit of the flight, um… crowd­ing him. It just didn’t look proper. The in-flight meal was Rein­deer Meat­balls, and by gum it was the best rein­deer meat­balls I’ve ever had.

We arrived at our hotel around 9 a.m. (Hotel Reyk­javik Cen­trum.) The hotel is just two years old and when they were build­ing it, dur­ing the exca­va­tion found Viking ruins under­neath, now part of a museum and his­tor­i­cal exhi­bi­tion. Jus­tine had called ahead and told them we were get­ting mar­ried, so they let us check in early. We grabbed a very quick 90 minute nap, and I woke up feel­ing like hell. I think I’d rather be hung over than sleep deprived. We grabbed cof­fee to get closer to nor­mal, and had a lovely lunch near the com­pact city cen­ter. Once done we had to get Justine’s divorce papers final­ized, or autho­rized, or some­thing. Once that was done, we headed to the Mag­is­trates office, which was very close to the hotel, at least accord­ing to the front desk woman. When we arrived, we found out that we were in the wrong place by quite some mea­sure. We had 10 min­utes to get where we needed to go, and had to take a taxi. The few taxi’s we’d seen in Ice­land were all Mer­cedes, as was this one. Our 5 minute taxi ride cost us $15/US. Yikes.

Once we got to where we needed to be, we were greeted by a lovely woman that Jus­tine had been cor­re­spond­ing with — Johanna Bjorg Hal­lis­dot­tir. She was very help­ful, and quite dis­traught that we didn’t have the orig­i­nal copies of our birth cer­tifi­cates. She wasn’t dis­traught as petty bureau­crats are, but rather as some­one who really cared about mak­ing sure this hap­pened. Once she got the OK from the lawyer to use copies, we found out we didn’t have the money to pay for the cer­e­mony. They don’t take US cur­rency or Credit Cards, only Ice­landic kro­nas. Every guide­book has said that plas­tic is the way to go, but appar­ently not when it comes to mak­ing a woman hon­est. At this point, we are both think­ing we aren’t every going to get mar­ried. I started telling Jus­tine how we’ll just get mar­ried some­place else, don’t jump off the ledge, etc. How­ever, the woman behind the counter said she’d just e-mail us the bank­ing infor­ma­tion and we could send pay­ment later. What a great coun­try and great peo­ple. I wel­come our Viking Overloards.

We met the lawyer and set up my video cam­era so we could get a video of the event. Then, as the cer­e­mony started, we were asked to stand. So our video con­sists of the very soft spo­ken Ice­landic Judge (or what­ever) with a heavy accent read­ing to us and our bel­lies get­ting video­taped. And since I’m the only one of us with a belly, it was just my belly. The cer­e­mony was very nice, and very unique and very mov­ing. The part where Jus­tine promised to Obey, obey and obey some more really meant a lot to me. She then gave me my ring with the inscrip­tion “one ring to rule them all.” Oh — wait it says “one love to rule them all.” Since I’m not allowed to take it off, i’ll just have trust that’s what it says.

So now we are mar­ried. She’s not quite sure what she’s chang­ing her name to — Jus­tine Louise Cain, or Jus­tine Divett Cain, or just Candy Cain (her idea, not mine.) And i was wrong. Ice­land isn’t frigid at all. :)