Amy Osmun assumed she’d never see Mike Gilberstadt again.
They’d met only 10 hours before. Now they were standing in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, facing one another, both putting off the farewells.
But time was ticking. They were both set to catch connecting flights — Amy to Scotland, Mike to Greece.
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“I guess we have to say goodbye,” Amy said reluctantly.
Mike leaned in to hug Amy and kissed her, briefly, on the cheek. Then Mike readied to leave, adjusting the bag on his shoulder.
He was about to turn away when Amy spoke. “Is that all I’m going to get?” she said with a smile.
Even as she said it, Amy knew this was a moment she’d remember.
“That’s when he gave me a real kiss,” Amy tells CNN Travel today.
“It was absolutely electric.”
For a moment, Amy and Mike stood, kissing, amid the crowds of travellers at the airport.
And then it really was time to say goodbye. Mike took Amy’s number, writing down her details on a scrap of paper.
Then they went in different directions.
As Amy walked away from Mike, she tried to make sense of what had just happened.
She never usually spoke to strangers while travelling, let alone kissed them.
And she couldn’t figure out how her airport embrace with Mike fit into the wider context of her life.
Was Mike just a stranger she’d quickly forget? Or would she look back and feel sadness, regret?
As Amy lined up at her gate, she tried to shake herself out of her reverie and swipe Mike from her mind.
After all, she wasn’t just travelling to Scotland for a holiday — she was visiting her boyfriend.
Mike couldn’t be someone, Amy told herself, because she already had her someone.
Airplane encounter
Amy and Mike met on March 23, 2006, on an plane about to depart Los Angeles International Airport.
Back then, Amy was a 24-year-old trainee dietician at California State University, flying to Scotland for spring break.
She’d ended up with the middle seat — an unenviable prospect for a long-haul flight.
Although there was someone sitting next to Amy by the window, there was no one in the aisle seat.
“It looked like I had an empty seat next to me for the long-haul flight so I was pretty excited,” Amy recalls today.
“And then I swear, right before the plane doors closed, he came sauntering down the aisle.”
“He”, of course, was Mike — who is, by his own admission, “not a punctual man”.
The last to board, he bounced into the empty seat next to Amy, who couldn’t help but roll her eyes.
“I was not impressed in the moment, as I faced a 10-hour flight squished in a middle seat,” Amy recalls.
But then Mike apologised — half jokingly, half sincere — for ruining Amy’s flight.
And then, noting her eye mask and travel neck pillow already wrapped around her head, Mike — half jokingly, half sincere — offered Amy his shoulder to sleep on instead.
Amy smiled despite herself.
Once they were in the air, and Amy’s food choice arrived and looked less-than-edible, Mike insisted she help herself to his meal tray.
As she picked food off his plate, the pair started chatting — realising they were a similar age, both living in Southern California, both interested in travel.
Amy thought Mike was funny and self-assured. And, while she noted he tried to mask it under jokes and bravado, he seemed kind.
Feeling comfortable in his presence, and desperate to sleep, she accepted his offer of sleeping on his shoulder.
Several hours later, Mike and Amy landed in Amsterdam. As they disembarked the airplane, Mike suggested they go for coffee.
In the queue, and later as they walked through the airport, they continued chatting.
Amy noted how easy conversation was, even though they barely knew one another and were both bleary-eyed from the overnight flight.
Then, somehow, they ended up kissing in the middle of Schipol Airport.
“I thought I’d never see him again,” Amy says. “So I was like, ‘Why not go out there a little bit?’.”
Long haul to phone calls
As for Mike, he’d liked Amy from the moment she scowled at him, eye mask perched on her head, as he boarded the plane at LAX.
Throughout his time in Greece, he regularly replayed the airport kiss in his mind, hoping he’d see Amy again, wondering if and when he should get in touch.
Meanwhile Amy was enduring a “disastrous” visit with her long-distance boyfriend. She left Scotland single.
The break-up wasn’t really anything to do with Mike, Amy says today. She just realised this particular guy wasn’t right for her.
Back in California, Amy returned to her classes and doubled down on her studies.
From time to time, her thoughts drifted to Mike — on their immediate rapport, on the airport kiss.
But when he unexpectedly phoned her one day and asked her out, Amy said no. She was still reeling from her break-up and didn’t want to jump into anything new too quickly.
Over the next several weeks, Mike kept calling. Soon, the pair was chatting on the phone for hours at a time.
“Mike was still just as charming as he was on the plane and at the airport,” Amy says.
“So I finally took him up and we went on our first date.”
That first evening, Amy and Mike met up for sushi and went for a walk on the beach which turned into Mike giving Amy a piggyback ride. They collapsed onto the sand, laughing.
Later, back at Mike’s apartment, Amy marvelled at the fact Mike’s television had TiVo — a recording device that allowed viewers to record live television to watch later.
Amy wrote a list of her favourite shows and asked Mike if he could record them — partly a ruse to return to his apartment to watch them.
A week or so later, Amy and Mike had their second date at the themed dinner entertainment venue Medieval Times.
Afterwards, back at Mike’s apartment, they caught glimpses of distant fireworks illuminating the skies at Disneyland.
Over the next weeks, they continued meeting up regularly.
“A month or so in, I had met his parents,” Amy recalls. This felt especially significant because Amy had never met her previous boyfriend’s family or friends.
There were other signs Mike was in it for the long haul.
“He let slip that he had told a friend that he thought he was going to marry me,” Amy recalls.
Nevertheless, Amy worried her happiness with Mike had an end date. She was set to leave the US for the UK for several months as part of her dietetics degree.
Amy worried her new relationship wouldn’t survive this distance, and she debated what to do — eventually ending things with Mike before she left for the UK.
The truth was, both were concerned about the impact of long distance on their fledgling relationship.
Mike didn’t want Amy to leave, but Amy wasn’t going to abandon a great career opportunity.
Reluctantly, they both concluded the relationship must have run its course.
“So we broke up,” Amy says. “But we stayed in touch.”
Staying in touch
As soon as Amy left, Mike was flooded with regret. He wished he could have gone to the UK with her, and he thought about her often.
Amy missed Mike too. They kept up to date on one another’s lives via email and the occasional phone call. With social media then still in its infancy, Mike also resorted to old school methods, sending heartfelt cards to Amy across the Atlantic.
Today, Mike jokes this “never happened”. He says he’s not generally prone to putting pen to paper, and rarely sends cards to anyone on any occasion.
But Amy has the proof. She kept all Mike’s long-distance correspondence, including a Valentine’s Day card he sent her in February 2007.
“It was fate I met you,” Mike’s message in the card reads.
“If I wasn’t tied to Orange County, I would follow you anywhere. But most of all I wish you all the happiness in the world. You’ll always be my Valentine.”
Not long after Amy returned home to California that spring, she reunited with Mike. They picked a pointedly non-romantic spot for the reunion: Target, in San Diego.
They were excited to see each other again, and kept stealing glances across the Target aisle.
Within days, they were a couple again.
Moving forward
From then on, Amy and Mike’s relationship was unwavering and solid.
“Once we got back together, we were together,” is how Mike puts it.
Amy finished her studies and started working as a dietician in a hospital. She and Mike moved in together.
In late 2007, the couple went to Ireland and Italy. While on a stopover in Venice, Mike asked Amy to marry him.
“We get in that gondola and then under the Rialto Bridge he popped down on his knee on the gondola and proposed,” Amy recalls.
She wasn’t expecting the proposal at all, but Amy was thrilled and said yes immediately.
“It was a fun surprise,” Amy says. “And we got to spend the rest of the trip engaged, which was fun.”
Back home in the US, Mike and Amy started planning their wedding for the following year. That’s when they realised their parents shared a wedding anniversary: November 1.
As a nod to that coincidence, Amy and Mike were married on November 2, 2008. Amy took Mike’s name, becoming Amy Gilberstadt.
During their ceremony, the couple toasted their parents’ long marriages and their own future.
The speeches from friends and family also included several references to Amy and Mike’s cinematic airplane meeting.
Right after their wedding, they boarded another plane — travelling to Hong Kong and India for their honeymoon.
This kickstarted a pattern — each year, Amy and Mike committed to two big vacations a year.
They have since visited destinations including Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti.
Amy and Mike welcomed their son in 2010, delighted to become parents.
“I’d always wanted children — I wanted to have a son and name him after me, which I’ve done, so they could know my pain of having their calls answered and their mail opened,” Mike says with a laugh.
Mike and Amy had a daughter in 2013. The couple describe their two kids as “pretty darn fabulous”.
Over the years, the couple has enjoyed watching one another find their footing as parents.
“I can keep the play dates, the organisational stuff, going, but I was not, and I’m still not, very good at playing,” Amy says to Mike.
“You’re really good at that. I would give myself about five minutes of playing Barbies and I was like, ‘I’ve got to go do something else.’ And you could be up there for ages with our daughter.”
“We had a whole world going on,” Mike says of his years playing Barbies with his daughter.
Staying strong
In recent years, Amy and Mike have also supported each other through tougher times.
In 2020, Amy’s aunt died suddenly and her mother became extremely ill with COVID-19.
That same year, Mike’s mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“That was a really tough time,” Amy says.
She and Mike rallied together around their loved ones and “survived loss and illness”, as Amy puts it.
“We’re still going strong,” she says.
Today, Amy and Mike are focused on family, travel and adventures.
The Gilberstadts recently caught the Northern Lights in Alaska and went to Vermont to see April’s solar eclipse.
“I had never seen a total solar eclipse before so I wasn’t expecting much from that but that was way more amazing than I thought it would be,” Mike says.
“It was quite a celestial trip.”
Later this year, Amy and Mike hope to take their kids to Japan — an 11-hour-plus flight from LAX.
They joke they still operate on long-haul flights very similarly to how they did on that first flight more than 18 years ago: Amy tries everything to get some sleep, while Mike will always offer her his shoulder or lap.
But they always avoid the middle seat — even though it’s what brought them together all those years ago.
Today, Amy and Mike look back on their first meeting with a mix of joy, surprise and gratitude.
Amy gets a little “teary-eyed” to reflect on their random meeting and everything they’ve been through since.
“I can’t believe it,” she says.
As for Mike, he possibly said it best in one of his other rare forays into card writing — on Amy’s first Mother’s Day in 2010.
“Who would’ve thought all these things would happen. Hopping on that flight to Greece was the best and most rewarding thing I have ever done.”