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Last weekend I took Chip home to meet my parents.

Under the guise of attending a good friend from high school�s wedding, I managed to wrestle him away from work for a day and a half to bookend the wedding and spend a few days, perhaps against his better judgment, in northern Michigan.

It started out innocently enough, and really when I think back, the first two days of the trip were fantastic. The last two, however�

But I�m getting ahead of myself, and I seem to remember mentioning portents just a few sentences ago.

The first of which was that we had to cross a picket line at LAX in order to fly to northern Michigan. Both us rather bleeding heart liberals, neither of us were terribly comfortable with the thought. We managed to circumvent the happenstance by taking the long way around and going in through arrivals and up the back elevator to the ticket booth. Which was, (to neither of our surprise, as Northworst had just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and we were taking the red-eye) fairly deserted. We�d printed out our boarding passes earlier in the day, so all we had to do was check luggage. So we walked up to the counter and waited. And waited. And waited. Dear god did we wait. I�m not sure if we were invisible, the girl behind the ticket counter was really that stupid, or the people in front of us really had their travel arrangements FUBARed, but we waited for a good twenty minutes just to pick up the stupid destination sticker they put on your luggage. After that we got to go stand in line so that we could tell the security guard that we promised we weren�t packing heat in our suitcases so could we go stand in the next security line, please. We�ve all queued up before, and many of us for a lot longer than 20 minutes. But when you�re taking your boyfriend home to meet your parents, are about to see a bunch of friends you haven�t seen in over a year (and they haven�t seen your currently skinny bod since you were 18) and it�s way past your bedtime, you tend to get a bit� fidgety. Maybe slightly grumpy. And definitely plenty snarky. I pulled more looks from the people around us (and not to mention Chip) than I have in a good long while. After that ordeal, we both needed a drink. So we moseyed over to the terminal bar�.

Where we got what was possibly the stupidest waitress this side of that one guy at Carl�s Jr. who couldn�t seem to get my order right to save his (or my) life. After chugging two hefty margaritas, we got over to our gate in just enough time to hear our seats being called. I�m not sure what we did when checking in online, but somewhere along the way, a computer virus or evil AI decided to put in requests for the two smallest seats in the history of small airplane seats, ever. At least that�s what it felt like. And at least I had an aisle seat�Chip was stuck in the middle seat in our who-the-fuck-flies-at-this-time-of-night-I�m-confused filled to capacity plane row. As I don�t sleep on planes, I popped three Tylenol Simply Sleep pills and waited for the Sandman to take me. He never really came, the bastard. So of course when we got to Detroit (and had three hours to wait before we caught our connecting flight) I was hit with the Holy Shit Dead Tireds and tried to sleep on Chips leg for a few hours. Unfortunately, Detroit is doing some renovating in the terminal we were flying out of, and it was completely open to the elements and Holy Shit Dead Cold.

We managed to get on the connecting flight, despite the fact that they oversold the flight by FOUR PEOPLE (in a 30-seat plane, mind you), which was great� except the fact that we managed to get stuck sitting in front of a man who, for the entire HOUR we sat on the runway waiting to take off, talked incessantly (and rather erroneously) to the people behind us about how Democrats were the only ones who wrote history books (I shit you not, he said no Republican had ever written a history book that was used in our schools) and various other bullshit yada that had me nigh on turning around and punching the guy in the mouf.

And this was actually not a terribly heinous trip. I�ve had worse. The rest of Friday and Saturday (we left on Thursday night) was great, actually. Chip seemed to get on with my folks splendidly, and I took him to some of my old haunts and got a sandwich from my favorite sandwich place, and a cookie from my favorite cookie place, and generally drove about and I reminisced about my youth, which Chip always seems to enjoy.

The wedding itself was also terrific. The ceremony was gorgeous with a couple of moments that were just quintessentially The Bride. It was great. Chip met a bunch of my old friends and we went out for a few cocktails before heading off to the reception which was equally gorge. We danced the night away, got pleasantly drunk, and even managed to make friends with the future in-law of a good friend, who let us in on the little secret that she�d been having a friend pee in a cup for her on her marijuana drug tests for the past six months.

Even Sunday morning started off rather nicely. I woke up to only a mild hangover that I thought would soon be cured by my mother�s famous pancakes.

An hour later found me upchucking the pancakes into an empty trash can in my old childhood bedroom with Chip watching, horrified, from the doorway. The day only got worse from there. I was so heinously sick (this was more than hangover sick�I had contracted something nasty) that I didn�t make it back downstairs to rescue Chip from the grilling of my parents for about five hours. At which point I scared everyone out of the family room with still more puking. The puking continued on well into the night�past the point where my grandparents showed up and surrounded Chip on either side to regale him with tales from their youth, and, no doubt, the parts of mine where I was running around a lot naked with a Cabbage Patch Kid gripped by the hair in my hand.

I didn�t recover until well into the next day and was plagued by migraines and headaches for the next week. Chip had to leave on a much earlier flight on Monday to get back to work for a half day in LA, and upon landing from his connecting flight in Detroit found that one of the bottles of cherry wine we�d bought that weekend had been smashed at planeside carry-on check (on those tiny little puddle jumpers, they only let you take a purse-sized piece, the rest they check planeside) and had spilled over most of the contents of his carry-on.

The upside? While Chip�s stuff got a little wet with wine, the asshat that had been spewed Republican bullshit (I love me some Republicans, but this guy was an uninformed douche bag) on our plane ride into town had also been on Chip�s flight back to Detroit. And his bag got doused. Heh.