A wedding weekend to remember
Apparently, I’m that magical age where all my friends are getting married and having babies.
A few weekends back, my boyfriend, Brett, and I, met in Des Moines, Iowa, to attend a mutual friend’s wedding. I thought we would have quite a bit of free time. The wedding only takes two hours, at the most, and we were not planning on staying at the reception very long, to distance from people as much as possible.
Usually, we have a list a mile long of places we want to eat, and nothing specific for non-food activities to do. We can only eat so much, so this time, I started thinking on activities a couple days in advance.
I suggested a scavenger hunt, since we could probably find one online we could complete outside. Brett helped me look through the online options. Most of the hunts seemed to fall into one of two categories. They were either for (little) children, or for bachelorette parties. Eventually, we each found a hunt that sounded fun, though sorting through the world of the internet was probably a bigger challenge than finding anything on those lists.
Another idea I came up with, was a painting class, but finding an online video so we could do it outside. Brett seemed less enthusiastic about that one, so I decided not to buy supplies unless we decided we wanted to do it.
Of course, nothing ever goes as planned.
By the time I got to town Friday night, and we got our stuff hauled to the hotel room, it was pretty late. It didn’t help that the parking garage was full of people driving way too fast and there were no places to walk out, other than the car exit, unless you already had your hotel key, which I did not.
Someone walked out the door I was trying to get in, so I made it in. Unfortunately, the door led to the wrong hotel, so I still ended up taking the long way around. There were a lot fewer cars driving in the elevator though, so it was a good thing in the long run. However, it took me 20 minutes from when Brett saw me drive into the parking garage, to find him again.
Saturday was the wedding, but we took it easy in the morning. Brett went to donate blood and I stayed in the hotel room to spend a little extra time practicing Russian. We snagged an early lunch and then we started to get ready for the wedding.
I must have gotten ready faster than Brett anticipated I would, because we walked out of our hotel room the same time some of the members of the bridal party were walking out of theirs.
So we went for a drive, then to the wedding, which was nice. Brett and I went with friends to a pizza place, to waste time between the ceremony and the reception. The pizza looked and smelled good, but Brett and I had eaten too much for lunch to even think about getting food. It was good to see them. Then, a bee tried to drown itself in my pop, followed by a hornet, followed by the bee, again. We all escaped with no stings.
We promised one of the friends we would take their card to the reception, since they were not going. About five minutes before the reception started, we decided to drive over to it.
Of course, on the way there, we got rear-ended. There was minimal damage to Brett’s car, but Brett did want to visit an urgent care center. All the urgent cares were closed, because it was 4:30 on a Saturday. So, we ended up in the emergency room.
Brett eventually started feeling better and all the tests came back good, so we were good to go.
We still managed to make the reception and only four hours late. They had pizza, so we each had a slice and chatted with the bride for a bit. Then, we were off.
We took a nap while our takeout order was cooking, then ate and went for a couple-mile walk. It was midnight by the time we went to bed.
The next day, we drove all the way across town for bubble tea, only to find out that they had bubbly tea, not tea with boba balls in it. It was still good, though, because dogs were allowed at that coffee shop.
We went for another walk and ate lunch. Before we knew it, the weekend was over, with no time for the activities we had planned.
Honestly, we both had fun, minus the ER trip, and our drives back home went well. I even had some entertainment for the way home. A chicken crossed the road at a major intersection in the center of Des Moines (and made it). It’s always something. I laughed about it half the way home.
