They Actually Went Through With It
by Dave Johnston

Setting the Stage

The morning of the September 20th found my wife Kim and I driving North to Pottstown, PA, for the wedding of Mike, PBS Online's Assistant Director of Technology, to his long-time girlfriend and sometime fiancée (more on this later), Kaela Parkhouse. Kim and I had never been to Pottstown, and saw this as an opportunity not only to share in the joy of a colleague and friend, but also to get away from the kids!

When we got on I-95 at Springfield, the air was heavy with humidity, but the sky showed signs of clearing, with little breaks of blue among the otherwise heavy cloud cover. It was warm -- highs in the Washington area were predicted to reach 90 degrees. As we rolled through Maryland toward the Delaware border, we had varying degrees of clouds and sun, though when we got to Chester, PA, and started heading northwest toward Pottstown, there was decidedly more gray than blue in the sky.

The gentle rolling countryside of the highway from King of Prussia to Pottstown is very pretty. Having recently returned from a trip to San Jose, CA , where the foothills at this time of year are covered with brown dead grass, the scenery here was relatively lush and green. As we approached Pottstown we saw two HUGE cooling towers, not unlike those which we recall from Three Mile Island! They loomed on the horizon for quite some time, ending up behind us just before we reached our Pottstown exit. We arrived at Pottstown at 1:00pm, an hour before the ceremony. The sky was gray, though not particularly threatening, but it was still quite warm and oppressively humid. A weather front was predicted to pass through, and temperatures were supposed to plummet into the fifties overnight!

(Go back up and click on the heart!)