Surprise Birthday Trip to Turkey
This year Harrison gifted me an amazing surprise birthday trip to Turkey. He actually started planning it back in April and he never let out a single hint that he was even up to something. Not only did he put immense effort into researching and creating a well thought out itinerary, he also put a ton of effort into tricking me.
A couple weeks earlier, Harrison implanted in my head that he might need to fly to Canada for work, he just didn’t know when. Two days earlier Harrison intentionally left his phone near me while he pretended to look for something in the other room. When his phone started ringing, I saw the picture and name of his CEO pop up. I ran to hand him his phone and the conversation immediately sounded like a serious one.
Afterwards he told me that something was going down at work and he needed to fly to Canada to have some meetings. (The phone call was actually from his brother, and he changed the contact info) This is when he confessed and said that he did have something small planned for my birthday but because of this last minute trip to Canada he would have to cancel it. To make up for it though and not abandon me on my birthday, he said he would take me to Canada with him on his business trip instead.
Two days later I have my packed suitcase and I’m waiting at his office ready to head to the airport. During this time, he’s constantly interacting with his coworkers talking about the game plan in Canada. Several coworkers also come up to me to make random conversation about Canada and offered restaurant recommendations and sights to see.
As we’re heading to the airport, our Uber driver sings to us to keep us entertained. At the same time, Harrison hands me a green folder that had our Canada itinerary in it. It showed our confirmation number, seats, his credit card number charged for the flights as well as a working QR code, just in case I checked. Little did I know that he faked the entire document.
At the airport we head on over to Air Canada to check in for our flight. I tried to punch in our passport info to print out boarding passes, but I kept getting error messages. I asked for help from one of the Air Canada counter personnels but she had no luck either.
When she asked for our itinerary, Harrison pulled out a different colored folder than the one he originally showed me. After a few seconds of looking over the documents, she had a confused look on her face and stated that this itinerary was for Istanbul. Finally, after months of planning and weeks of nervousness, Harrison’s able to burst with excitement and shout in my ears that we’re headed for Istanbul.
tl;dr - watch the video instead!