happy happy

happy happy, originally uploaded by buki-rama.

I've been spending a lot of time watching TV these days. I usually like to read during the day when I am home alone, and I have a large stack of assorted books from the library just waiting to be read, but the last week or two, I have felt either too tired or too headach-ey to read and instead spend my free time laying on the couch and watching daytime TV.
(whew- I just want to point out that was a record-breaking run-on sentence. I am exhausted)

One of my favorite shows to watch is Samantha Brown- Passport to Europe. Samantha has my dream job. (That is-my dream job if I wasn't already doing my dream job.) She travels the world and tells us what the best hotels, restaurants, shopping venues, tourist spots are in assorted cities. This is what she does for a living. Can you stand it? Some of you may remember her from her original show- Great Hotels - where she did the same thing, just more in the United States, but it was still the same idea, go and stay at a hotel and tell us what all the great things are about said hotel. Not a bad gig if you ask me.

Anyway- I know I had a point here somewhere and that is that today Samantha Brown is in Paris and it made me think of the trip Chris and I took to Paris, in January 2005. Chris planned most of the trip (as he is the King of doing) and we were lucky enough to stay in some incredible hotels in France and Italy because we were able to barter rooms with the hotels there and the hotel that Chris was running at the time here in Miami. So, we stayed at some amazing hotels - for free or close to free - and had a generally incredible trip, visiting Paris, then driving through the South of France and Monaco, into Italy, to Florence and then took a train to Rome.

Now, if that was all there was to the trip, it would have been a Dream Vacation, end of story, but what I did not know until we left France and were driving into Italy, was that this was the trip where Chris was going to propose to me. And that is what he did. On a street overlooking the Mediterranean just over the border into Italy, Chris pulled the car over, took out a ring, got on one knee and proposed.
At the time, it was the happiest moment of my life.
But life has a way of just getting better and better sometimes doesn't it?