I fell completely in love with my neighbor 4 years ago today. Unfortunately we were only neighbors for three hours... just enough time to fly from Athens to Zurich.

In fact, we almost missed each other – I had left my passport in my hostel and spent a nail-biting 40 minutes sitting on my backpack at the taxi drop-off imagining the boarding line shrinking and my flight leaving without me. My taxi-courier arrived, I handed him all of my remaining Euros, and tore through the airport to my gate. I made it in time to board and had even caught my breath enough to smile as the Swiss Airlines flight-attendant swiped my boarding pass.

I sat down and just as I got my heart-rate back to normal a gorgeous woman walked down the aisle, the last to board the plane. My heart revved up again, "there's no way that super-model is sitting next to me..." - but she slid into the middle seat next to mine and my heart was back into high-gear. Turning on all the charm I could muster – I began one of the strangest and most wonderful dates of my life.

We started out tentatively, as first dates usually go, "Where are you from? Where are you going?" - except this time we were a few thousand feet above the Acropolis. By the time we were cruising out of Greece our books and magazines lay completely forgotten by our knees. Flying above Albania we were treated to a concert by all the babies on-board (including some impressive vocal ranges from the soloists). The music faded as we flew over Bosnia - I recited some of my favorite Russian poetry to convince Elena that Russian doesn't always sound like an angry general yelling orders. We reached Croatia just in time for dinner - we ordered macaroni and cheese – and finished up with some Swiss chocolate enjoyed over the Adriatic Sea.

As they cleared our trays, the Alps appeared, conical castles poking through the clouds – and we knew that it was time for our fantastic flight together to come back to Earth. Three perfect hours, one perfect date – but it was hard to believe anything would come of our great story with one of us living in Madrid and the other in New York.

We started building the bridge to cross the 3600 miles separating us by email, but after a few months words-on-a-screen weren't enough and Elena came to visit me in New York. We began a real relationship, and started to build a more solid foundation for the fantasy-made-reality that had originally been built on the clouds. Within two years we were completely committed and I moved everything to Madrid where made a new life together. Today also celebrates 10 days since we made yet another new life together – our son. We've built a family we could hardly have imagined when we were adventuring in the clouds.