SURPRISE! - Jason's 36th birthday

Well, this surprise has been a long time coming and now I am super excited to write about it.  We were able to keep it (pretty much) a secret until the morning that we left.  Here's how it all went down.  (Warning - it is a long one...  I am just so darn excited that the trip was a success and I am worried I will leave out a detail.)


My hubs is a huge Tampa Bay Rays fan.  Their Triple-A team is the Durham Bulls and we usually have a mini-plan each year.  Anyway... He has been dying to go see them in person for a while.  It isn't easy for us to get to the Tampa/St. Petersburg area, so we have been trying to see them in a city close(ish) to us.  I checked the MLB schedule as soon as it came out at the end of 2010.  Lo and behold, it was a miracle - they Rays were playing the Baltimore Orioles the weekend of the hubs' birthday!  The little gears in my head immediately started turning!


In late-January, I mentioned the idea to my mother-in-law.  After talking to her, the final decision was made - we were going to Baltimore.  We purchased great tickets (behind home plate) for one game and pretty dang good tickets (down the 3rd base line) for another game.  We made plans to ride the train to Baltimore on Saturday morning and return via train on Monday.  It was going to be great!  It was also going to be a big surprise!


About two weeks before his birthday, the hubs started getting a little antsy about birthday plans.  My mother-in-law loves to make a big deal out of birthdays and she hadn't really said a lot.  During that week, he also came in the office while I was working on an email to my boss about being off work - of course, that made him more curious about the birthday plans.  I told my mother-in-law about her nosey/sneaky son, and we started coming up with our little white lie...


My mother-in-law and I created a fake birthday weekend trip.  We decided that we were going to "go to Wilmington for the weekend".  We told the hubs that we would be driving down to Wilmington on Saturday morning.  We would be spending the afternoon around the waterfront area.  That evening we would go to Fort Fisher Aquarium because my father-in-law needed to attend a reception for a special project/event, then we would go to a nice dinner.  We told him that on Sunday, we would do some shopping, exploring, and relaxing.  He seemed to fall for it, but as time went on I had a feeling he thought something was fishy....


On Saturday morning, my in-laws showed up at our home around 8:45.  My mother-in-law decided that the hubs needed to open his birthday gifts before we went on our "field trip" to Wilmington.  Here's what happened next - see the video on YouTube.

We loaded up and took the train to Baltimore for the weekend.  Here are some pictures from our weekend...

The happy birthday hubs at the train station

My father-in-law at the hubs at the game on Saturday evening

Happy hubs with some NatBoh's beer

My mother-in-law and the hubs at the game on Sunday afternoon

It was a wonderful weekend!!!  We had a great time.  I think that the hubs was genuinely surprised and would probably say it was the best birthday gift he has ever gotten!  We were able to see a lot of former Durham Bulls and that definitely helped me follow the game more (I am totally not a sports fan). 

YAY for an awesome weekend!  Happy birthday to my dear hubs, Jason!!!