Blue water=bliss...

When my fiance and I first started dating, we'd spend long hours in his hot tub relaxing and musing about our future. He was determined to leave Charlotte. He even had a plan. A ten year plan at that.

I'm a planner.

Nothing makes me happier than planning and dreaming. The best dream plans are those that involve travel. And his most certainly did.

We were going to work on remodeling his house. And then after ten years, we'd move. He was thinking San Diego...or some part of California...on the coast.

I had never been to California. Neither had he. And I suppose that sounded far off and exotic.

Me, I'm an east coast girl. I dreamed of Florida, maybe The Keys. I dreamed of being somewhere that I could explore happily for a long time. I imagined palm trees and sand and blue water.

Then we broke up. Only just before we broke up, I gave him a lead on a job. Once the job was completed, he offered to pay me for it. The industry standard was roughly ten percent. Only...he gave me a second option.

What if, instead of paying me, we went on a trip together. And I saw a way for us to find our way back to each other. So, I took the trip idea and ran with it. I did all the planning. He did all the paying. In the end, on the budget I was allotted, I managed to get us round trip flights to Miami where we would spend one night before boarding a cruise ship. We would be stopping in Key West and Cozumel. And then, we would have two more days in Miami at another resort before we flew home.

Ten days of bliss. Ten days to see if we could handle being together without killing one another or growing bored.

We weren't bored. We didn't fight. We faced the challenges that come with travel with humor and sarcasm. I fell in love all over again.

It was easy to fall in love with a man who made me towel animals to recreate one of my favorite aspects of the cruise. It was easy to fall in love with a man who indulged my whim of driving The Keys...on Valentine's Day, no less.

That's when his dream of moving to California changed. Instead, we dreamed of blue water. We dreamed of a home in The Keys and a boat to travel by.

They were such pretty dreams. It was such a beautiful plan.