wedding road trip

Day 6: Thanks, Facebook!

Back in eighth grade, I was a huge dork.

I know, I know, this is incredibly hard for you to believe, but it’s true.

I was an overzealous, awkward, pimple-covered dork whose one joy in life was the Buena Swim Club. My partner in crime was a guy named Nate, who coasted through our swim workouts with a “no problems” attitude that left me fuming when he still managed to kick my ass every single day.

Enter Facebook, the social app that allows you to waste several hours a day connecting with people you haven’t seen or thought of in twenty years. When I friend requested Nate, I half expected him to write back, “Jaime who?” Thankfully, he at least fake-acknowledged our former swim relationship and raised me one with an offer to visit him and his family in South Jordan, Utah.

Our visit to South Jordan was by far our loosest connection on the Wedding Road Trip itinerary. But strangely, from the first second I saw Nate and met his family, I felt like nineteen years hadn’t passed at all. Nate still looks exactly the same, minus a head full of curls and plus a leg brace, that he rightfully earned while going a bit nuts with the coaster brakes on his wife’s cruiser bike. Nate’s wife Rika is tall and thin, with a head full of beautiful blonde highlights I can only dream of attaining. Their two kids, Addy and Jo, could not be more different- Addy is the rogue wanderer with a mind that’s faster than she can begin to express while Jo is the stoic, wise thinker, ever assessing the climate around her.

After the kids went to bed on our second night in town, Nate and Rika told us the story of how they met at Thatcher, a boarding school in Ojai, California. Rika claims Nate was number ten on the Frosh Meat list, while she was the ugly duckling who could barely utter a sentence to anyone, let alone a hot guy. I find this a little hard to believe, as Rika is a very attractive woman, but since I wasn’t at Thatcher in 1991, I’ll have to trust her on this one.

It took three years and a crazy, bi-polar girlfriend of Nate’s to bring the two of them together, but when they finally decided to date, the rest was history. More than fourteen years later, they are still going strong.

While Nate might be the crafty one in the relationship (he built the guest suite that we stayed in, which was nicer than most four-star hotels), Rika is the one with a planner’s eye. Though Nate claims she can “plan too much,” I could sense an underlying admiration for Rika’s ability to orchestrate and delegate. The relationship is clearly balanced, offering both Nate and Rika the opportunity to lead and to follow.

I think what impressed us most about Nate and Rika is their ability to take risks. They’ve lived everywhere from Carlsbad, New Mexico to Athens, Georgia and plan on taking their kids to live in Nate’s native country of Australia, once they’re “old enough to appreciate it.” The kids, that is, not Nate and Rika. I doubt Nate and Rika will ever truly grow up.

And that is a very, very good thing.