I woke up ridiculously early so that I could do laundry and homework. So exciting on a vacation! I had a map of the hotel and the laundry room looked easy enough to find, so I grabbed our bag of dirty clothes and trekked out of our room. Unfortunately, the map LIED. I ended up trapped over in the indoor-pool area, and at one point took an elevator into the spa reception office. I finally went back the way I came and went down to the main lobby and had to go outside and then back in to actually get to the laundry room. By the time I got back to the room, I had been gone for 40 minutes!
I sat down to do some homework and managed to get quite a bit done. And luckily one teacher had posted on Blackboard the night before that if we needed more time to just let her know. Thank god!! So when I woke up that morning I saw she had responded and said I could take a few extra days, which made all the difference in the world! While I was working I had Mark finish the laundry. Finally I had done enough and it was time to get ready for the wedding!
Honestly, I was not looking too forward to driving another hour back up the mountains, as the roads were a little treacherous. Then I realized that at least on the way there, I would be on the inside lane! So that made it a bit better! Mark said he would drive to get us there faster, and I said no way! Faster is not an option when I'm afraid of falling off a cliff!
I put on my red dress and miraculously we left on time - 2 hours early! The wedding site was at Glacier Point, about an hour from the hotel. Andra said we may run into lots of traffic since it was Saturday, and she left even earlier than we did! It wasn't necessary to leave quite so early and we made it to Glacier Point with about 50 minutes to spare. 6 miles of the road was unpaved and covered in lots of loose gravel which made for a pretty bumpy ride, but it really wasn't too bad. When we got to the parking lot, we wondered how we would find everyone, but it turned out to not be an issue.
Wedding tailgate!
The bride was rather easy to spot standing in the parking lot. We parked our Altima and joined the group. Apparently driving 6 miles on an unpaved road adds lots of dust to cars, and soon that dust transferred itself to our dresses. No problem, it brushed off easily.
Eventually we decided to vacate the parking lot and made our way to the overlook.
It was hideous.
We took some pictures while we waited for the rest of the people to arrive.
And finally it was time for Andra to get married!
As I was the MOH I had to give up my camera to Mark so that I could stand next to Andra during the wedding. This drove me nuts, especially when I could see that the batteries died AGAIN right before the end of the ceremony (he took them out and started shaking them to try and get a little more life out of them!). Of course the extra batteries I had weren't accessible during the ceremony. We had a ton of issues with this camera during the few days we used it (borrowed from my dad), and I have a lot of regret that I did not buy a DSLR before the trip as I had been planning all along. After the ceremony, we took a lot more pictures, and the camera was sucking down batteries like a vacuum, and took forever to "process" between shots. Eventually when I went to review some pictures I realized that it had been dropping them. I estimate that it did not save approximately 200 or 300 pictures from the wedding alone, and of course we lost pictures from our other days too. I was somewhat heartbroken as I saw how many of the pictures weren't on the memory card, and which ones I lost - some of the very best ones, of course.
Major disappointment aside, it was a beautiful wedding. The location could not have been more gorgeous, and the weather was brilliant. I still managed some good pictures at least.
Eventually it was time to head back to the lodge for dinner. I braved the "bathroom" on the mountain - essentially a room containing a toilet over a deep hole in the ground. Not the best smelling of places!
On the drive back to the lodge we stopped to take pictures of a lovely deer who decided to have dinner on the side of the road! He tried to eat a whole apple, and it looked really weird when he spit it out!
We got back to the lodge and Ji and I decided to change out of our uncomfortable dresses. We went down to dinner and it was beautiful!
The dinner was great. It was a beautiful wedding from start to end. We only cried a little bit! Everyone looked great, the bride was beautiful and we are so happy for her!
Part 4 coming soon!I think this will be a 6 part series! :)
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