Our story

Early on the morning of April 1, 1997 my boyfriend came and picked me up and we were off on a week long adventure....the first stop was Gatlinburg, TN so we could get married.....This adventure was not planned in order to impress anyone or to make a big to do about what we were doing..we were simply putting one foot in front of the other and living life....But it turned out to be quite a story and a fun one too..

Our was truly an elopment...only my children and Bryan's grandmother knew that we were off to get married....I remember looking over at Bryan as we drove through the park on the way to Gatlinburg...I think he was as scared as I was...what if this turned out as bad as our last marriages? hmmmm.
When we got to Gatlinburg, we stopped at the Chamber of Commerce to find someone to marry us.....THEY ARE CLOSED ON TUESDAY!!!!!!!!! this was a Tuesday..... LOL now what??? They told us about a town just a few miles up the road where we could get married on a Tuesday...Seiverville, TN.....so we were on our way..We got to the courthouse that has a statue of Dolly Parton in the front... :-) I am not kidding . and we went inside..there were already several couples in front of us..this is TN after all...so we got our license and asked them where we could get married.. they gave us a list of folks that could do it...then someone told us we could just walk right across the street to Temple's Feed and Seed and he will marry you.....so that is what we did...We walked into the store and the lady looked us over and said you must be here to get married.....hmmmm YES..........she said Jimmy will be right with you he is with a customer...so we went into his office and waited for him to finish weighing out onion sets for his customer...She let us watch a video about this man that was going to marry us while we waited....Seems like he was pretty famous...CNN had done a piece about him and we watched in amazement at how we had been led to this wonderful little man to marry us....He married hundreds of couples every year...We were not even the first for that morning... His name was Jimmy Temple and he was quite the personality around Seiverville... When he came into the office, he talked to us a little bit and then reminded us we would need the rings that we had left in the truck.. LOL so Bryan went to get them.... Then he married us......After we were married, he said instead of paying me just make a donation to the piano fund for my church and we put money in the little donation box.. then he took pictures of us and we hugged him and left on our great adventure..
I remember going across the highway to Mrs. Winner's and getting sweet tea...I think I was still too excited to eat..and we left Seiverville for our cabin in the mountains around Gatlinburg....
We called Seaboard Farms where we both worked and told them we were married...they laughed and said yeah right April Fools...we said No...for real....I still can't believe no one put two and two together and figured out what we were up to...after all we both had taken off the same week for vacation.. :-) We spent a week in the mountain cabin and had such a good time. It had been a long road for us to get to that point and we were so glad to have each other... I have not regretted for even one day marrying this man. We are a team put together by Divine design.........
I love our love story..we truly let God write our story..even to the man that married us...our plans had been Gatlinburg, His plan had been a little town and Mr Temple.....we still see him occasionally when we go to Seiverville..about 2 years ago he took us into his office and as we sat with him, he told us of the beautiful piano for his church that had been bought with donations. He is truly a special man..
So tomorrow we celebrate 13 years together..just living life with our eyes on Him..and letting Him write our story..it is never boring..
Happy Anniversary to us..