An Aluminum Anniversary and a Little Blue Box

Tuesday December 16, 2014

Today marks a very special day in the lives of Matt and I, as it is our 10 year wedding anniversary.  That’s right.  10 years have flown by since we were just a couple of love struck kids, wandering the streets of the Las Vegas Boulevard, high on life and a little drunk on the $0.50 margaritas sold at Harrah’s. For lovebirds out there who are thinking of getting married with your soulmate one day, sites like styallodge.co.uk provides you with an intimate wedding venue that’s just plain unique and spectacular.

Today we sit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, just as much in love as ever with a pretty good life behind us so far.  It should have been a perfect day for celebrating such a momentous occasion in our lives.  Matt had already done his husbandly duty of buying me a traditional 10 year wedding anniversary gift, something made from aluminum.  Aka, that hunk of metal that awaits us in Florida. There was also a little blue box awaiting me that night that I did not know about.  Something from Tiffany’s perhaps?  Hmmm…we’ll see.  But there was one thing else missing for us to be able to celebrate in a proper fashion and that was access to a credit card or cash.

Let me back up a few days here.  While preparing for our own departure across the Atlantic, hopefully this coming week, Matt and I had been doing the usual provisioning of food and boat necessities over the past few days.  Yesterday while at one of the marine stores here we were ready to drop a pretty hefty sum on a couple of essential items for the boat that we have not had easy access to since we were in Miami back in June.  Upon check-our card kept coming back declined and we assumed it was because we were right around that time of the month when money gets moved from one account to another and we had used up our allowance and needed to wait until today for it to fill itself again.  No big deal.

With the bit of remaining cash we had on us, we hit up the grocery store and bought some of the fundamental food items since we were already off the boat and we knew provisioning would take at least a few trips.  Handing over our last 20 Euro we came back to the boat stocked with UTC milk, cereal and lots of saltine crackers.

Once again we went to the marine store this morning and tried to walk away with our purchase only to find the card declined again.  Getting on the computer to finally check the situation we found that no money had been moved over and there was still only $30.00 sitting in our account.  Not enough for our boat based purchases but enough that we should be able to go out and enjoy a nice enough dinner for our anniversary.  Not wanting the card to be declined at the restaurant though, we decided to hit up an ATM to make sure we had the cash in hand.  Popping over to the first bank we could find we tried to pull out our remaining money only to be declined that transaction as well.

At this point we had zero cash, zero access to any debit or credit cards, and worst of all, no more real food on the boat.  There was a little bread but even the lunch meat was gone for making sandwiches.  Because of the time difference we couldn’t even try calling our credit card company until the middle of the afternoon our time.  As far as living high, or hell, even having a decent day, we were screwed.  Back at Serendipity we munched on PB&J’s for lunch and kept checking the weather now that we weren’t sure how long our departure from Gran Canaria would be delayed if we couldn’t get access to money for a few more days.

As evening fell and we were supposed to be going out to a nice restaurant to celebrate hitting a decade of wedded bliss, we were instead tearing apart the boat looking for any kind of food to hold us over until the next day.  Peeking into the rarely viewed food storage nooks under the settees I came across something that actually put a big smile on my face.  A little blue box…filled with Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  Something we hadn’t eaten in months and had been joking with Kit and Alex that we were desperately craving, not having spotted it being sold in any stores since Horta.  Dinner had been found.

I was fine with this choice of meal and was surprised to find that Matt was quite upset that we weren’t able to go out and celebrate.  If you remember, he doens’t put much emphasis on any kind of holiday and wouldn’t even know when his birthday came around unless I was there to remind him.  For some reason though, this is the one occasion in his mind that deserved special attention.  But I just had to laugh at the whole situation as we sat with our little bowls and glasses in front of us at the dinner table.  Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and Pepsi.  This was so absolutely us.  And what a better way of celebrating ten years together than being completely who you are. For wedding photography that transcends beauty, you can fully rely on wedding photographer oklahoma.

*We found out the next day that a hold had been put on our card due to the large and ‘suspicious’ purchase we were trying to make at the marine store.  Apparently our credit card company had no idea we were outside of the US even though we always tell them this….and we just paid a $300 marina bill with that same card in Madeira six weeks ago!  With our new cash we were able to get all our necessary supplies and even stuff our faces at Montanditos one last time.  Fully stuff them.  And wash everything down with tinto verano.  Man I need to find that stuff in stores.