Tis the season for funny Valentines.

Inspired by the bizarre and virally popular tale of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o and his phantom love who supposedly survived a car wreck, then emerged from a coma only to die of cancer, we asked readers to share their crazy-in-love stories. (Happily we heard no tales of fake dead girlfriends.) 

Valentine’s Weekend 2010 was no time for travel. Snow and icy roads forced MARTA to halt all bus service for hours. Icy conditions also led the Georgia Department of Transportation to close a bridge over the Chattahoochee River on northbound Ga. 400. More than 1,000 flights were canceled.

None of that was keeping Bhairavi Bhatt Dudley in Atlanta. She was determined to get to her honey, two states away.

“I figured I would beat the weather, but it didn’t happen,” she said, recalling the crawl through town and out of Georgia, en route to North Carolina where her beau was.

“I was stuck on 85 for three hours,” she said. “Eventually I had to get a cheap hotel in South Carolina because it was getting worse.”

She finally made it the next day.

“When I got there, he had roses and a big teddy bear waiting,” she said of Dr. Stephen Dudley, now her husband. “I say it paid off.”

Travel and the pursuit of love seem to go together.

“I was madly in love. I wasn’t thinking straight,” Natalie Drew said as she recalled a 1992 odyssey fueled by passion. She was 16 and living in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Her beloved lived 300 miles away.

“I needed to take two trains to get there,” said Drew, who now lives in Dunwoody. “I had to switch trains at 3 a.m. I overslept my stop and had to jump from a moving train. Everyone on the train and at the station were shocked.”

Not as shocked as she was when she bumped into her guy at the theater. With his new girlfriend.

Drew Plant and Bill Golden might be able to empathize, after their misadventure in 2003.

“For our second Valentine’s Day together, my partner and I were on a trip to South Florida,” Plant recalled. “I had an assignment from a magazine to interview author Andrew Tobias in South Beach. Once that was done, we were going to enjoy a great Valentine’s weekend.”

While Plant was working, Golden went to check in and discovered they’d been given subprime real estate, right behind the hotel’s restaurant, and there was no parking available due to a visiting boat show. No problem, they figured, setting off in search of better digs.

Who knew the whole world would be vacationing in South Florida that weekend?

“We finally found a room, literally the last one at maybe the fifth place we had tried. A smoking room. Ick,” Plant said.

Still determined to wring a little joy from the weekend, they settled for dinner at the only place with an available table.

Denny’s.

“Needless to say, it made for a Valentine’s Day to remember,” Plant said. “Maybe not in the way we had anticipated, but it affirmed our mutual love, of people-watching and learning to enjoy whatever comes our way, so long as we are together.”

Is there a better ending to a love story?