A fairy tale

Astonishing as it may seem, I have never blogged about this, at least as near as I can tell.

So, back in 1997, Mary and I were planning to get married in June, and one Sunday (I swear it was a Sunday).  We were trying to figure out what to do for our honeymoon.  My idea was to throw the dog in the back of the old Volvo and drive through the maritime provinces of Canada. So we were sitting around the apartment in Greenwich Village when the buzzer rang.  It was an extra super-duper special delivery from some service.  I think it was US Mail, but that seems impossible, so it must have been something else.

It was an announcement from the Dicasterere di Turismo i Cultura della Republica de San Marino -- you can probably figure enough of that out if I just remind those of you who might not know that San Marino is a microstate completely surrounded by Italy with population of 25,000.  It told us that Mary had won the Romeo Martinez International Photo Prize, which included an all expenses paid trip to San Marino for the International Photomeet there, as well as a cash prize of 5,000,000 lire (this was pre Euro days), or about $3,000.

This sort of solved our honeymoon thinking, as the Photomeet was gonna be a few weeks after our wedding.

And the really crazy thing is, there's almost no evidence anywhere on the internet that this Romeo Martinez Prize or the Photomeet actually happened.  Like maybe 10 hits on Google.  It appears to have happened maybe twice, in 1997 and again in 1998, when the prize was won by a Mexican photographer.  But, like the flower in the desert, there it was, funding our honeymoon.

Somewhere around this room we've got a catalog from the Photomeet, and I've got honeymoon pix from San Marino, which was kind of a tourist trap but a perfectly decent place to get over our jet lag before continuing on to an awesome trip.