Fellow travelers finally got set on the same path
Lari Daily and Michael Moix were on separate journeys when they first met, but it didn’t take them long to get on the same path.
Both worked in software development in July 2000, but for different companies, and flew frequently with TWA out of the Little Rock airport to work with clients — Lari’s in Detroit and Michael’s in Philadelphia. They were often on the same connecting flight home from St Louis.
They had done the same route for months and Michael was working on expense reports when he noticed Lari talking with another frequent flyer in the airport where they waited to board a plane.
“There were lots of strikes, lots of delays, people sat on the tarmac forever,” Lari says. “We were spending a lot of time in the airport.”
He was impressed by her style and the way she carried herself. She was seated two or three rows in front of him on the plane, and he decided he would try to strike up a conversation with her at the baggage claim in Little Rock.
“We get to Little Rock and I go to baggage claim and she’s not there. She’s nowhere,” he says.
Lari, he would later learn, had a corporate apartment in Detroit and did not need to carry baggage. At the time, he was simply disappointed to have missed out.
It was later that Lari noticed Michael for the first time.
“It’s a Friday, it’s Flight 227, I’m on board, and this has been a nightmare summer for travel. We have closed the door and are pulling back from the gateway, and they say, ‘Oh, we’re going to go back and get this one passenger,’” she says. “There’s this groan in the airplane. I’m thinking, ‘If whoever this is makes us miss our spot in the taxi line, I’m going to be so mad.’”
That person was Michael. His connecting flight from Philadelphia had been delayed, and his frequent flyer status helped ensure he would be accommodated.
His seat was right next to Lari, meaning he finally got the chance to chat.
“My great pickup line was, ‘Hey, do you travel often?’” he says.
They were stuck on the tarmac for a couple of hours that day, and their conversation flowed the whole time and continued on their journey home.
They exchanged business cards because Lari was cautious about giving her contact information to someone she had just met on plane.
“We started dating and we both had a really good time,” Lari says. “But I was in training with my company to be an expat for two or three years on a big software development project, and that was what I had been working toward since my freshman year of college — all through grad school and putting in time at my company learning the software. This was eight years in the making. But I didn’t go.”
This would have been Lari’s third time living in Germany, albeit in a new area. Her company sent her to Germany for two weeks so she could meet her colleagues and see where she would be living.
“I went over there and I was like, ‘I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this.’ I had been working for this for ages, but really and truly I would much rather start a life with Michael back home,” Lari says.
Germany aside, Lari and Michael, still frequent travelers, were often only in Little Rock for 12 hours or so at the same time, so being intentional about their time together was key.
Michael proposed in September 2001, over a picnic at an overlook at Petit Jean State Park.
His plan to propose had been put on hold before that because he was in Seattle on Sept. 11 and flights were temporarily grounded. The morning of their picnic, Lari had a headache and he had to convince her to go. Then he had to wait out a woman who somehow sensed what he planned to do and intended to watch, until she was led away by a man who also seemed to know what was happening.
Lari caught on to Michael’s plan when he pulled out a rose and a ring.
They were married on May 11, 2002, at Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock.
Lari gave Michael a sterling silver magnifying glass before they exchanged their vows, explaining she had been “holding him under that magnifying glass, looking for flaws and making sure he was worth standing before God and friends and family and vowing to have and to hold until death do us part,” says Lari, adding that she was trading it for rose-colored glasses. “It has actually come in handy for getting splinters out of kids’ fingers.”
They have four children – Jeremiah, 18, Ruthie Grace, 16, Hannah, 14, and Bethany, 12.
Lari told a friend, after meeting Michael, that he “is not the marrying kind,” meaning he did not fulfill the complete list of physical characteristics she had created in her head for a potential spouse.
“But he was like a best friend,” she says. “We really mesh so well together.”
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