Wedding season is now in full swing. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon how you look at it) Rachel and i are officially done with weddings for the summer. Sure, seeing old friends and acting like we’re in college again is enough fun to be criminal, but plane tickets and hotels are expensive, not to mention the toll a weekend of hedonistic behavior takes on your body. Plus, i can only spend so much time in Crate and Barrel buying wedding gifts before my imminent yuppie future smacks me in the face.
That being said, weddings are still ridiculously fun. I’m not jaded or cynical enough at this point to question if the marriage will last, instead, i still get a kick out of seeing two people that i know love each other make a life long commitment. I’m still new enough to this whole thing that i haven’t had friends get married and then split up a few years later, so i continue to get all sappy and sentimental at weddings. Plus, who doesn’t love free food, drinks, and a few hours of getting down on the dance floor?
Corey and Beth’s wedding in Denver turned out to be a fantastic weekend. We flew in Wednesday night after work and stayed at Beth’s parents’ house with Beth, Corey, and Katie. Thursday was spent helping prep for the wedding. Thursday night were the bachelor/bachelorette parties, which stayed relatively tame. Friday was more wedding prep, rehearsal and rehearsal dinner. Corey’s parents chose an old mansion in Downtown Denver for the rehearsal dinner and invited a whopping 109 people. Open bar, great food from St. Louis and Denver, beautiful setting, great people, no complaints here.
Saturday was the big day. Both the ceremony and the reception were supposed to be outside, but when a light drizzle just before the ceremony was to start turned into pouring rain and hail, both events got moved inside. While it would have been nice outside, most people get married in a sanctuary, so it was certainly not the end of the world. I ushered, so unfortunately, i didn’t get to catch all of the ceremony (Beth, we’d like to buy a DVD), it seemed to go perfectly as planned. The party then moved to the Colorado History Museum in Downtown Denver for the reception. Once again, great people, great food, music, dancing, who can complain? Because there’s only one flight a day out of DFW to Cozumel, Corey and Beth had to be at DIA at something like 6:30 the next morning to leave on their honeymoon, so they took an early exit from the reception. The rest of the 20-somethings decided that it was too early to call in a night, so we hopped on a shuttle and took one Denver bar by storm. It’s been a very long time since i heard last call at a bar and then wondered around trying to find a cab afterward. It’s certainly not something i’d do very often, but every once in a while, with the right group of people, it can be fun.
Following the theme of acting like we’re in college again, a group of us decided that since we’d likely be getting in late Saturday night and checking out early Sunday morning, it would be a good idea to cram 7 people into a hotel room just a few blocks from the reception. After sleeping on the floor saturday night, sunday morning was a bit of a rude awakening. My back was totally screwed up, my throat was sore, and my voice was gone. Three nights in a row of staying out late and consuming much more alcohol than normal certainly took its toll.
The most amazing thing about the wedding were the people. Though Corey and Beth come from very different families, it was amazing to see how all of their 20-something friends, be they from childhood, high school, college, St. Louis, Texas, Denver, or California, just clicked. I fully expected to see fractured social circles only hanging out with people they already knew, but instead everyone made an effort to get to know everyone else. I was expecting to have a great time seeing people from Trinity that i hadn’t seen in a while, but was not expecting to make a whole bunch of new friends that i had heard about, but either never met before, or only met in passing. That we all went out together after the reception without the two people that brought us all together (though it would have been even more fun if they had been able to come) was the perfect end to a fantastic weekend.
Hopefully this weekend will happen at a much slower pace than last weekend. Rachel’s aunt and uncle, Mark and Pam, are at their house in Mexico for a while, so we’re keeping an eye on their house while they’re gone. I think this weekend we’re going to stay at their place, lounge around, read a little, maybe watch some College World Series, take naps (haven’t done that in a while), and fire up the smoker again to barbeque some ribs. I’ve also got to plan my training schedule for the rest of the bike racing season and figure out what races i’ll be doing from here on out. The big race i was planning to peak for, the San Francisco Twilight crit got canceled because of a lack of sponsorship, so i’m going to have to find another race to peak for. Hopfully, if all goes right, i’ll feel much better and more refreshed going into this Monday than i was last Monday.
The new iPhone came out today. How long until i decide i have to upgrade?
