Lara Filine and Peter Ernest Blume were married March 7 at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. Angel L. Lopez, a staff member of the City Clerk’s Office, officiated.
The bride, 58, is an information technology enterprise architect at Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, N.J. She was previously a chief technology officer at Credit2B, a software development company in South Plainsfield, N.J. She graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology, where she also received a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science.
She is the daughter of the late Zoya Filine and the late Leonid Filine, who lived in Moscow.
Mr. Blume, 71, is a retired New York-based independent architect and contractor. He graduated from the City College of New York’s School of Architecture. He is a son of the late Elizabeth Mitchell Blume and the late Arthur E. Blume, who lived in Ghent, N.Y.
The bride’s first marriage ended in divorce, as did the groom’s.
Ms. Filine and Mr. Blume met in a bar at an airport in Bogotá, Colombia, in June 2013.
She told him that she was returning from a trip back to her home, then in Long Valley, N.J. He told her that he was on hiatus from a motorcycle trip he had taken through South America and was heading home to his apartment in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Mr. Blume had cruised on his 2008 BMW R 1200 GS Adventure from New York down through Florida, to visit friends, and then across the Gulf of Mexico region to Texas and into Mexico and kept on going to Yucatán, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Peru — a round-trip total of roughly 10,000 miles, he said. (There are no overland routes, or roads, from Panama to Colombia, so Mr. Blume had his motorcycle flown from Panama to Lima, Peru where he visited yet another friend.)
“I thought he was crazy,” Ms. Filine said. “He actually has two motorcycles, and I told him that anyone who would ride on one of those things that far and through all of that rugged terrain has to have a death wish.”
But all he wished for was to see her again, and invited her to the Scotland Connecticut Highland Games in Scotland, Conn. The festival, complete with bagpipes and kilts and filled with competitive events like drumming and dancing, celebrates both Scottish and Gaelic culture.
“Her response was ‘it sounds like fun, but can we take a car?’” Mr. Blume recalled, laughing.
He agreed and they were off. At the Scotland event, Ms. Filine asked Mr. Blume to share with her a plate of haggis, which, unbeknown to both of them, is a Scottish dish of sheep’s offal mixed with suet, oatmeal and seasoning and boiled in a bag.
“It was horrible,” Mr. Blume said. ”I felt compelled to eat it, along with some other stuff I couldn’t identify because we were on our first date, and I didn’t want her to think I was the type of guy who wouldn’t try something new.”
They were walking off the haggis, which Ms. Filine also described as “awful,” when they happened upon a group of children hula hooping. Ms. Filine joined them.
“It was a spur-of-the-moment reaction that really told me a lot about Lara, how she can be serious and talented and yet have that kind of playful side to her, a kind of youthful energy and sense of adventure,” he said.
A few days later they went on a second date, to a restaurant in Mr. Blume’s neighborhood, and a third date followed at Ms. Filine’s home. And within a few months, Ms. Filine was spending a lot of time at Mr. Blume’s retreat house in Hunter, N.Y., which he built himself.
“Although he pays a little too much attention to his motorcycles, Peter is a very warm and talented man,” Ms. Filine said. “We laugh together and sometimes we cry together, but whatever we do, we always do it together.”
Ms. Filine’s grown son from her previous marriage and her granddaughter also enjoy spending time at Mr. Blume’s country home in the Catskills.
“We just have a great time at the house,” said Mr. Blume, who also has a grown son from his previous marriage.
“I love spending time with Lara,” he said. “She’s so much fun to be with because she has a very broad range of interests, and she’s highly educated, athletic and adventurous. Now if I could only get her to like my motorcycles a little bit more, she would be perfect.”
