Will said he wanted to surprise me, and I knew he was planning something big. I didn’t know what, and if Simone knew, she wasn’t giving anything away.
“You’ll see,” was all she was prepared to say.
At the end of the day, Will took my hand and said, “Mrs. Ashton, would you do me the honor of coming upstairs with me,” I was delighted to go to our wedding night bedroom, which I had asked to be decorated with white roses and lilies.
But when we got upstairs, the bed was gone.
Instead, there was a tent, pitched on the floor.
“What is this?” I asked Will.
“Are we seriously camping on our wedding night?”
I was struggling to hide my dismay.
He pointed at the tent, “Go in,” he said.
I had to get onto my hands and knees, carefully, as my dress was rather tight-fitting, and crawled inside.
There were two sleeping bags and a bottle of wine, which he opened and poured into two glasses.
“You made me the happiest man in the world today,” he said.
I felt tears jumping into my eyes.
This was what I’d wanted, well, this, without the sleeping on the floor and freezing my ass off.
“Did you really turn off the heating?” I asked him.
He went on as if I hadn’t spoken, “I wanted to think of the right honeymoon destination, and I wanted it to be special. As special as you are.”
I nodded, smiling, secretly wondering what he had planned for us.
“Obviously, there had to be mountains around.”
Oh? That was interesting. Suddenly, I became nervous.
“I thought about doing a trail hike at Everest base camp.”
Good God, no, I thought.
“But then that seemed rather strenuous.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“And then I thought, what about Colorado and our own rockin’ Rockies?”
Sweet Jesus, I thought to myself, please tell me I won’t be seeing Colorado Chuck on my honeymoon!
“Then I thought of us climbing Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa.”
He beamed at me, and I smiled carefully.
“But then I thought, let’s do another kind of peak… a more man-made sort of peak.”
What the hell was he talking about?
“The Eiffel Tower, that’s a peak of sorts, right?”