dani's 15 minutes of fame

As I alluded to yesterday, our trip home Saturday had a little bit of excitement. I'll just type it out in the order it all happened...

We were at the Los Angeles airport and as our boarding time was approaching, Danielle and I decided to use the restroom. As we approached the monitors that displayed the departure times of flights, we noticed a couple of cameramen with their cameras pointed at the monitors. I then notice a couple also standing there and instantly knew I'd seen them before. They had been on TV but I couldn't remember what show. I tell Danielle and we both rack our brains trying to figure out where we've seen them before. We then realize that there's another couple there (two African American women) and the light bulb goes on - they're a part of the TV show, The Amazing Race.

I go up to the familiar looking guy and ask him if he's a part of The Amazing Race and he tells me all that he can say is that they're in a race. I wish him luck and walk away still not knowing where I know him from. Danielle then asks, "weren't they on Big Brother?" YES!! That's where they're from. Jeff [Schroeder] and Jordan [Lloyd] were fan favorites on last season's popular reality TV show Big Brother, and made it obvious on the show that they had feelings for each other. Jordan was the eventual winner of the season.

Okay... this is pretty big for me. The Amazing Race and a Big Brother connection. I watch both of these shows (yes, I like reality TV). I tell Danielle to take a picture with her iPhone. She doesn't want to do it but hands her phone over to me. So I step forward and take the two best pictures I can without making it seem overly obvious of what I'm doing. We then leave to go share our bit of news with Don and Jake. Before we board our plane, I update my Facebook status with what I thought was pretty exciting and Danielle updated her Twitter with the simple statement, "It never fails. I always see famous people at the LAX airport," along with the picture of Jeff and Jordan (the one I took!).

An hour into the flight, we're told by the pilot that there is a medical emergency on board and we have to make an emergency detour to the Las Vegas airport. Ugh! Although I understood the need to do this, I just wanted to get home. As we deplaned, Danielle turned on her iPhone and found that she had numerous updates/comments to her Twitter - all expressing great excitement over her sighting and photo. By the time we get to Denver, the feedback is at a frenzy level.

I say frenzy level because evidently we (because it really was a joint effort) broke the news to the world that not only had the 16th season of The Amazing Race started (that day, as it turns out), but that Jeff and Jordan were one of the teams. Word traveled fast and now the information that we had and the photo that we took is all over the internet. And not just blogs and forums, but such sites as Entertainment Weekly and other celebrity monitoring sites. Most of them give credit to Danielle as the one who took the picture and even that she broke the story. It's been crazy to see the photo everywhere as well as Danielle's name and account of what we saw.

You can google and find the pics but I'll save you the trouble by posting them here. You can also read Danielle's Twitter posts here.




Dani is enjoying her 15 minutes of fame. Had we known this was such a big deal, we would have tried to take a few more pictures, not of just Jeff and Jordan, but the other teams as well. It will be fun to watch the next season knowing that we have a connection to it.