The Riggs: Soaring!

I have the best husband EVER. He surprised me with a wonderful wonderful gift yesterday. My birthday is in 4 days and J.R. and Pam got together and well I'll just show you what I got to do today.

Ever since I met J.R. he has been obsessed with planes and flying. He has wanted to get his pilots liscence and I've always encouraged him to go for it because I know its something he loves. Pam works with a guy, M, that owns his own plane and has been telling J.R. that he will fly us just about whenever we want. J.R. has always been very excited about this prospect but has never taken him up on the offer, that is until a couple weeks ago. A few weeks ago J.R. came home beaming and told me I was going to get a "kick ass birthday present" (so very unlike J.R. to say ANYTHING like this.) If you know me, you know I love surprises so I definitely didn't want him to spoil this surprise. Little did I know was that J.R. had gone up with M. It almost killed J.R. to keep this a secret from me as he was so excited about it.

This week Pam emailed me and told me she wanted to take me to brunch Sunday morning for my birthday. I hestitated a little bit because I really hate missing church, but I figured I couldn't turn down her generous offer and agreed to go. On the way to brunch yesterday morning J.R. gave me the following card.

I was stunned. (This is highly unusual because J.R. has a very difficult time surprising me. I always seem to know what is coming even if I'm not trying or even want to know.) He had even thought ahead to pack some clothes for me as he knew I wouldn't want to spend the day at Catalina in a dress. What a great guy!

So after a short flight to Catalina and a very scary bus ride down the hill to the town, we spent the day just walking around, doing a little sight seeing and just enjoying our time together. It was really wonderful. But, honestly, for me the highlight was flying. It was SO.MUCH.FUN. Throughout the whole time M kept looking at me and asking if I was ok and if I was nervous. I thought are you kidding? this is fun. We are also going to be doing a lot more of this. M is working on gaining more hours and told us he'll take us up just about whenever we want. So exciting! So I'll leave you with some photos from our incredible day. What a great way to start off my birthday week!