Wedding, Jamaica, the Last Two Months of School
Our wedding went absolutely perfectly. We were prepared to deal with a few things going wrong, even after all that planning. But then nothing did. The location was beautiful, all the vendors were prompt, professional, and damned good at what they do. The guests all arrived on time, there were enough chairs, etc. The ceremony itself went beautifully. It was performed by George Bailey, who was sheriff of Albemarle County for 37 years, and who has written a gorgeous civil ceremony combining historical elements of colonial-era Virginia, Kahlil Gibran, and traditional Irish weddings. It was a very moving ceremony that touched all the important traditional elements we wanted, without invoking the cliches that we've all heard hundreds of times.
Dinner was delicious, and our first dance was a major surprise. Without telling anyone, we'd taken a few foxtrot lessons. So all of our friends and family expected us to just get up and sway, and instead we did the foxtrot! I think that impressed people as much as anything else. The rest of the night went by in a flash, with lots and lots of dancing, a lot of cake, and plenty of smiles and laughter. We had a wonderful time, and it seems like all of our guests did as well.
We got home after midnight, and peformed the traditional wedding night ritual of promptly falling asleep in preparation for our 4:45 alarm. As some cosmic joke, our flight to Jamaica left at 6:40 in the morning the next day, so the wedding barely felt over by the time we were on our way out of the country.
We spent five nights at the new Sandals Whitehouse resort. It was a perfect vacation for a honeymoon. I am not generally a fan of just sitting by the beach or pool for several days in a row, but I'm not sure we could have handled anything else. It was Wednesday before we actually felt normal again. So in that sense, it was very welcome that we didn't have to worry about where to eat, how to pay for things, etc. We just sat by the pool, sipped pina coladas (well, virgin pina coladas for me), read our books, and enjoyed being able to look at each other and say "You're my wife! You're my husband!" (sidenote: it pretty much defines what a dork I am that on my Caribbean beach honeymoon, I brought, read and enjoyed Kafka's The Trial, Borges' Labyrinths, and Nabokov's Pale Fire).
We don't have the wedding photos back from our photographer yet (a couple more weeks still), but here's a few shots from the honeymoon. The first three are the different angles off of our balcony (the third one shows the French village pool). The next two show the main pool and its swim-up bar, where we spent a lot of our time. And the last photo shows a first person view of what we were doing 90% of the time we were there. It feels good to be back, and great to be married.
