LOS ANGELES

Cindy’s Journal

June 24, 2001, LAX

Well, it was hard to believe! Dmitri and I were husband and wife and about to leave on our incredible journey. It didn’t seem real at all. The wedding was so wonderful. Perfect in every imaginable way. I cannot imagine a more perfect day. We thought we would spend some time on the plane writing thank yous but we didn’t get to it. When we arrived at the airport we realized that we weren’t sitting next to each other, which was pretty ridiculous. We appealed to the people at the gate and they switched us around, but I ended up sitting next to a very large man whose leg kept entering my personal space. I wasn’t too thrilled about that, but the flight wasn’t too bad. Daniel (the caterer) had wrapped up a little care package and so we had wedding food and cake to eat for the flight. We saw a truly terrible movie—Head Over Heels—and managed to get some sleep, but no thank you notes were written.

Dmitri Says

There’s a peculiarly surreal feeling to having just been married. You just sort of look at each other and say “OK, now what do we do?” Only we’d already been living in sin for some time, so there wasn’t a lot of novelty to it all.

I think the biggest thing was just having had that whole wedding OVER WITH. Don’t get me wrong–I had a fabulous time and saw so many good friends that I wish I could just live that day over again–but c’mon! Nothing’s worse than wedding planning, pre-wedding waiting, wedding this, wedding that. Nothing could have been worth all of that. It was close, though.

And it was nice to feel happy and snug for a little while with the new bride, who was similarly giggly and not at all being used to being “the wife.” So we’d make each other laugh just by saying “wife” and “husband” on the flight to Tahiti. Not a bad first stop to look forward to.