OUR FIRST MEETING- JANUARY 2,2001 I met my husband to be inside the North End Garage. This is a true and unusual story.. I was working for a horse drawn carriage company in Boston. Actually, I ran and operated the business, as the owner was never around, always taking off for Ireland. Michael was applying for a job with horse and carriages. I had interviewed him over the phone for the job. He had quite a bit of experience, and turned out to be exactly what we needed to have. We talked quite a bit, and got to know each other. We found that not only were we working well together, we enjoyed each other's company. We made each other laugh! I ended up 6 months later quitting my job. The owner was being unfair about not keeping up with the maintenance of the business, and was looking for me to pay his bills with my own money. I was already doing all of his work and my own too. I decided it was time that I would buy out one of the companies that was for sale, a different company, the largest horse drawn carriage company in Boston.

Michael and I have worked very hard for the past five years running our business.

Because I own the largest carriage company, we decided to take advantage of having 4 horse drawn carriages for the wedding. We also decided to have the wedding in the Boston Public Garden in front of the George Washington statue. I made the arrangements with the parks and recreations dept. with permits. Everything was in place.

Michael's older bother and sister played the music and sang for the wedding. My sister was my maid of honor, and had flown in from the USA. We had Michael's middle brother as the Best man, and our ring bearer was Max, a white Westie dog. Max is our mascot for our company. He wore a tuxedo for the wedding and was a perfect gentleman!

Our guests arrived to the park by horse drawn carriage. Max and his owner Lisa, had also arrived in this fashion. My friends Ellen and Bill were dressed for the Jimmy Buffet concert they were going to, after the reception! Parrot hats included!

Michael had arrived to the ceremony first. A park ranger on horseback, and a meter maid had come by to tell Michael that we could not have the wedding in the park, and that we were not allowed to park the horse carriages on the street! I had made arrangements for a police officer to direct traffic. He arrived shortly after, lights flashing on his police cruiser, so the meter maid and the park ranger riding his horse in the park, backed off. I had no idea there were any problems. I was on route to my wedding by horse and carriage at that point.

When the wedding was over, Michael and I took a short ride with our wedding video photographer to the other side of the park for photos. Our driver was instructed to leave us there and to go and help take other guests to the reception. We then went into the park for the photos and decided to take a swan boat ride. Our wedding day seemed to be going along just fine. We waited for our carriage to come back.

Our driver got stuck coming back because there was a bomb scare at one of the train stations on his route. We decided to hop a cab. Here we were, dressed in a formal tuxedo and wedding gown with a long train, getting into a cab with our video photographer, in front of the hotel! We drove a few blocks and got out, crossing the busy streets in our formal wear, and had to walk up the street to meet up with our driver!! We finally made it back to our reception. We were laughing the whole time just enjoying the fact that it's never a dull moment there.

After the reception, Michael and I had to take our horses to a babysitter. We left Boston with the big horse trailer and drove them to the baby sitters. We arrived there about midnight. We stopped by our house and there, my sister was waiting to take us back to the hotel. She started to back out of our yard, and got a flat tire in her rental car!! Now it was about 2:30 a.m. She had to call AAA.

We made it back to our hotel room at 4:00 a.m.! We had to be up at 6:30 a.m. to catch a flight to San Francisco! We made our flight but missed our van to take us to where we were going to rent an RV for a week. We took a cab, and we were so tired at this point the driver of the cab lied to us and told us that he charges £65.00 for the cab ride. He had taken wrong turns and added money onto his tab. We finally got our RV. We felt like we were living in the twilight zone!!