A stolen wave...

Just about six years ago, I was surfing at Gilgo beach in New York when some guy stole my wave.  Two months later we eloped.  We did it in secret, at the town hall which we were late to because we had to stop and buy wedding bands on the way in the middle of a can't see out the windshield torrential rainstorm.  My sister couldn't be there in person but she was there in cell phone, with her high school graduation head shot rubber banded to the key pad.  The love and lust that drove us to such a hasty and passionate decision slammed us head on into the fear and anxiety of telling our parents...worse yet my mom.  As a child my mom would surprise me with books on how to plan weddings by such greats as Martha Stewart...I had to use the utmost delicacy in breaking the news to her.  I took her out for a five scoop ice cream sundae and a walk through the cemetery. We found a bench in a family plot and sat in awkward silence until I couldn't handle the ice cream headaches anymore.  I pulled my left hand out, shoved my banded ring finger in her face "I'm married!" She cried violently for four seconds, then looked me dead and the eye and told me that I was going to have a wedding reception.  I knew that if I said no I was going end up crashing that family plot by digging my own grave next to them.
 So, we ended up having the reception and it rocked and my mother got her maniacal Martha Stewart wedding plans out of her system and everyone was happy.  As a wedding gift, a friend of ours gave us John Steinbeck's book Travels with Charley. A few weeks later I started reading it aloud when we drove to the beach to go surfing.  We would pull up to the surf spot and sit in the truck ignoring the waves until we finished reading the adventure in that chapter.  To put it in a nutshell...Travels with Charley was a true story about  John Steinbeck's adventures on the open road as he drove across country with his co-pilot, a big black poodle, named Charley. More then half way through the book, on our way back from Montauk Point, my husband swerved the truck into a parking lot.  I put down the book and saw that we stopped in front of a brown and tan Volkswagen Westfalia van.  "Why are we stopping?".  He didn't answer me because he was already out of the truck with his nose pressed against the dork-mobile's window. 
"Get my phone." 
Oh no. 
"This is perfect!  We can drive back to California in it!"  He had less then a year left in the Coast Guard and when he finished we planned to head back to his home state of California to use his G.I. Bill for college. 
Unfortunately, the owner of the van lived around the corner and he and my husband were crawling around in it like two boys in a tree fort in a matter of minutes.  It had a sink, refrigerator, stove, mini closets, a fold out table, two fold out beds and the owner was willing to throw in his Grateful Frisbee if we bought it.  It was pretty neat for a dork-mobile and it did come with a Frisbee.  I told him how we were just reading Travels with Charley and that's what inspired my husband pull over and check it out.  The owner said that was a pretty neat coincidence because he actually grew up next to Steinbeck in Sag Harbour, New York.  His mother even cleaned his house.  He said when he was little that he can remember climbing through Rocinante (that's the name Steinbeck gave his trusty truck in the book).  Fate couldn't have smacked us harder in the face.  We went to the bank, drained our wedding reception gift money savings and we became the proud owners of a dork-mobile and threw our new Grateful Dead Frisbee westward.
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