Mara: Food Blogging and Marriage

Aloha! My sweet friend Mara wrote a great guest post for me specifically about food blogging, marriage, and honeymooning! I will let her tell the story…

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Hi Salad Girl readers! I’m Mara, and I write a little food and cooking blog called “What’s For Dinner?” where I chronicle my adventures in cooking, and more recently, baking.

When Maggie asked me to do a guest post on weddings/marriage and how they relate to food and food blogging, I jumped at the chance! See, I got married to the love of my life this past November, and our wedding coincided nicely with the anniversary of my blog.

Not only has blogging my dinners made for more interesting meals in our house, it’s also helped to teach my husband, Adam, about various flavors that exist in the world, as well as the importance of having food that looks as good as it tastes.

But that’s not going to be what I write about. Oh no. Adam and I were put to the test mighty early in our marriage when we had a travel nightmare when trying to get to Jamaica on our honeymoon. How, you might be asking, does this relate to food blogging?

If you don’t want to click over, the nightmare in a nutshell was:

• Flew out of Chicago into Philadelphia just as the first Noreaster snowstorm hit.
• Got stuck in Philadelphia and missed our connecting flight
• Waited 8 hours at PHL for our bags, which, in turn, were sent without us to Jamaica.
• Spent the first night of our honeymoon in a crappy motel
• Spent the 2nd night of our honeymoon in a less crappy hotel
• Rearranged resort accommodations (Thanks Sandals!) and got put back on a flight to Chicago to wait for our new Jamaica flight
• PHL to Chicago flight got cancelled minutes before we arrived at the airport.
• Adam and I drove the 14 hours back to Chicago to wait for the Jamaica flight
• We never received one cent back from US Airways for extra expenses incurred.

Well, for one, without my food blog, I would not be able to remember that the first
night of our honeymoon’s dinner was:

And Adam’s was:

Thanks to my food blog, I was able to chronicle every moment of the nightmare that occurred between leaving Chicago (home) and finally leaving home again for Jamaica, and have it on a public and much-read forum. Thanks to my blog, Adam and I are able to relive exactly how remarkable it is that we made it through our ordeal without killing each other, and came out of it stronger in the long run.

Because of my food blog, we were able to recall small details of our trip that ordinarily would’ve been forgotten, and thanks to more technology, we were able to chronicle our road trip via Facebook! We are reminded every day exactly how well-deserved our honeymoon was once we actually made it there… and we enjoyed every moment.

Congratulations Maggie! I hope you enjoy every moment of your wedding and honeymoon! My advice? Remember to be tolerant! You never know when a difficult time can turn into the adventure of a lifetime!

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Thanks again, Mara! Thankfully our honeymoon has been almost snag-free so far (there was a glitch with Expedia and our rental car… I’ll update after it is resolved).

Have you ever had an issue with an airline? I’ve had lots of delayed flights, and one time Bobby and I were stuck in the Las Vegas airport overnight because a delay out of Philly (apparently PHL really stinks) on our way to California (SFO) – we ended up missing the last flight out because of the delay.

P.S. If you have been enjoying these marriage/food-related guest posts and want to do one yourself, send me what you got – magpie707 (at) gmail (dot) com. I am going to keep on posting them periodically after I’m back 🙂