They say you meet your person when you least expect it, and I can now attest to that! I had been living in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida for nearly a year and hadn't had much luck in the dating world. A friend of mine is a cruise planner and she had told me she was planning a group cruise for an organization called Jewbilee. They were out of San Francisco but cruising from Florida. If you know me, you know I'm social...but you also know that I think I'm way too cool for a Jewish group cruise. After some convincing, I got past my ego and agreed to go, far from optimistic about the kind of time I would have. As luck would have it, I would make my first (of many) Jewbilee friends, Adam, the night before the cruise left, having quickly bonded over being Deadheads. The next day, Adam and I went to dinner on the boat and he saw Joe sitting at one of the tables and suggested we join them. They had only met once before, but Adam said he was a nice guy. He was right! So nice! And nerdy...and goofy. I wasn't in the right mindset to meet someone special, but fate had other plans. We spent the next 3 days together on the cruise and had a great time, but no solid plans to meet in the future. Shortly thereafter I had decided to go to San Francisco to see Dead & Co. I asked Joe if he would like to meet up if I came a few days before the concert and he suggested we spend a long weekend in Napa. How could a girl say no to that! I had way better a time than I could have anticipated and fell for each other during that trip. As it turns out, I am definitely not too cool for a Jewish group cruise, or to have fallen in love with the best nerdy, goofy guy!

When it's this easy to be yourself around someone, you know it's right. When we met on that cruise, we bonded over Grateful Dead and gossiping about which of our fellow cruise mates were already making out less than 6 hours into the expedition. By the end of the trip, we were doing our best not to be our own little piece of the drama. And that was with me dying of seasickness most of the time.

We kept in touch over the next month, and when she said she'd be in the Bay in July, and asked if I would like to spend time together, the answer was easy. I responded with a question of my own: would she like to go to Napa with me. It seemed like a surefire plan. If everything went wrong, we'd still spend a weekend eating good food and drinking good wine in beautiful weather. If everything went right, maybe something more would come of it.

As should be obvious by now, everything went pretty right that weekend in July.