It all started the afternoon on January 29, 2014.... I had just gotten home from substitute teaching and I turned on the TV to relax a little before thinking about making dinner and cleaning the house. I tend to watch The Ellen Show because Ellen is hilarious! As I was watching this time I started to laugh when she began talking about these interesting online dating sites that she had seen or heard about. I laughed because my husband and I met on a unique dating site- FarmersOnly.com. As I'm watching, I just had this feeling that Ellen was going to bring up the dating site that Ryan and I met through...well turns out she did! After seeing this I quickly sent out a tweet.... the pic is proof that I actually did this!
I also included FarmersOnly in the tweet. Soon I got a tweet back from someone at FarmersOnly saying that they would love to hear our story. So I sent them a private message that looked like this....
I emailed Nicole from FarmersOnly and told her a little more about our story. Then she asked if she could call and talk about it in more detail. I said sure why not! It's fun to talk about our love story. Little did I know that when I would talk on the phone with Nicole that she would share a really fun opportunity. After telling her about why I used the dating site, how long we talked before we actually met, how we got engaged, the wedding and that we are expecting this coming July, she dropped the news....Nicole told me that people are always looking to interview people that "Found Love" using the FarmersOnly.com website. Hearing this I thought that it would be a magazine or a newspaper looking to interview. She asked if Ryan and I would be interested and of course I said yes. That's when she threw out there that The Katie Show (hosted by Katie Couric) wants to interview people that met through the FarmersOnly dating site. She then explained that they would be flying us out to New York on February 12 and interview on the 13th. Mind you this whole conversation happened on February 3rd. I told her I wasn't sure what Ryan would say to this because we had already planned to go to the National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville, Kentucky that same week, but I told her I'd let him know.
I thought Ryan would want to go to the Farm Show, but he was all for doing this! The following are the text messages between Ryan and myself....I'm the Blue boxes and Ryan is the Grey...
After this things just seemed to fall into place for us to go to New York! After a few more days we were finally contacted by the assistant producer of The Katie Show wanting to pre-interview us for the show. We both talked with her separately to get our views on how we met and the whole story. Then it was left up to me and the travel coordinator to get things rolling and find a way to get us to NY! Before we knew it we had plane and hotel reservations in our hands that said destination: New York!
We flew out on February 12 around 1pm. This was my first time flying and Ryan was having a good time trying to make me freak out while on the plane. He tried to tell me that one of the bolts was loose on the plane wing while we were mid-flight!
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| Goodbye, Chicago! |
We arrived at the Newark, New Jersey airport and we were greeted by our chauffeur who would be taking us to the Empire Hotel in New York City. I will honestly say that we were both happy to have someone else driving us around...New York is not some country back road!
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| View from our hotel room. |
Arriving at our hotel we promptly dropped off our luggage and headed in the direction of food! We ate at an Italian restaurant just across the street from our hotel, Cafe Fiorello. The food was delicious, or we were just really hungry! But we also met a fun older couple that we ended up talking with throughout dinner time. Their names were Agnes and Elliot. Tables in the restaurant were so close together that another couple seated next to you was like they were at the same table, so we started up a friendly conversation. We discovered that Agnes was the co-founder of Community Food Advocates: Fighting Poverty & Hunger in New York City and Elliot used to be a violinist. He played several times at the Lincoln Center in New York, but he also told us that he was the recorded violinist for the song "Cat's In The Cradle" by Harry Chapin! How cool is that! Agnes and Elliot were also the couple that told us that if we wanted the real "New York experience" that we should take the subway to Times Square.
So our next adventure that night was to Times Square! We jumped on the subway after being helped by a nice lady to buy our Metro tickets and most likely pissing some people off because we had no idea what we were doing! But we followed Agnes' directions to take the subway and get off after 3 stops, go any further and we would end up in the Bronx! The subway was scary. Nothing like taking the train to Chicago. We did make it to Times Square. And it sure is bright up there at night time! Here are some pictures that we took!
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| Can you find Batman? |
After having to ask a cop and a nice young lady how to get back to our hotel using the subway we made it back to the "comfort" of our hotel room. "Comfort" as in it's not our bed and the traffic is so loud all the time! We woke up early on February 13th because a car was to be picking us up at 7 A.M. to take us the studio. We woke up and it was snowing. Waiting for our car we learned that our flight home that afternoon was already cancelled due to the snow storm that just so happened to wreck havoc on New York and the surrounding East Coast. Anyways we got to the studio and were quickly taken to the green room of The Katie Show. We sat there talking with 3 other couples that were also going to be on the show with us. There was Andy and Megan who met on FitnessSingles.com, Pia and Dale who met on GlutenFreeSingles.com, and Arni and Helena who met on chat room for singles 50 and older. We then were moved to hair and make-up (the men just had to be powdered), we were prepped on what questions Katie was going to ask us and then we were moved to back stage. We briefly met Katie while we were all being seated on stage and then the filming began!
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| Ready for the camera! |
Ryan and I were up first to talk and share our story....talk about being nervous! First of all, you are talking to Katie Couric. Second of all, you have like 5 cameras and all these really bright lights in your face. Third of all, you are in front of almost 100 people that have no idea who you are and probably think you are weird because you had to use an extremely unique dating site to find love. But to all those people that think using a unique dating site is weird....how many of you can say that you were interviewed by Katie Couric???? That's what I thought, so keep your comments to yourself! The interview took no time at all and we were quickly escorted off the stage back into the green room.
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| We are the couple to the left of Katie when looking at the picture |
http://katiecouric.com/videos/unique-love-found-online/
That's when I felt like I could finally breathe again! But then came the question of how and when we were getting home. I talked with Hannah our travel coordinator and she quickly found us a new flight home...the next day at 7:15pm. We were kind of glad to be spending another day in NY, but we had no idea what to do! That's why we were glad to make friends with Arni and Helena who were on the show with us. We went to dinner with them and they showed us around Times Square a little more. We even went to see Jersey Boys (Ryan loved it!)
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| At M&M World in NY...3 floors all dedicated to M&M's! |
On our flight home the next day, Ryan and I decided that New York was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for these two country bumpkins! When you are used to the wide open spaces and quiet of the country you can't get used to the hustle and bustle of the city life.
10 Things We Learned About New York:
1) There is a lot of people always moving
2) Water in the hotel room cost way too much! $7.50 for a bottle of Fiji
3) Times Square is really bright at night
4) People look at you weird when you ask for help finding your way around this ginormous city
5) Everything is crowded or really small: restaurants, subways, hotel rooms...
6) They put snow plows and salt on their garbage trucks...genius!
7) Our New York Chauffeurs were not as nice as the chauffeur we had when we landed in Chicago
8) Even 8 stories up you can still hear cars honking their horns and the buildings just amplify the sound!
9) There are Purdue Grads there too! Ran into one at the theater when we went to see Jersey Boys. Boiler Up!
10) 20 city blocks equal 1 mile in the city. 1 mile normally equals the distance between two county roads in the country!
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