Chicago Part 1: The Wedding (1 comment)
Mel and I went to Chicago this (extended) weekend. There's far too much to expect anyone to read in a single entry, so I'm splitting it across a few. I figure I may as well start with the impetus for our trip: Dyanna and Eric's wedding. This was my first experience driving in the city, and we ran into some trouble in that the ceremony was being held at a building without an address. We finally found a park/underpass/parking situation that seemed to fit the description, so I grabbed a parking space and we got to walking.
As google maps's satellite photo shows, we had a bit of a hike from the parking I could find underneath lake shore drive and across the park, but we still arrived about 20 minutes early. About 40 minutes later, the bridal party arrived, with the bride not yet wearing her gown (I guess Dyanna didn't have a Dana quite so pushy as ours). Just under an hour late, the ceremony got going. It was sweet and pretty and fitting, and that's about as insightful as I get when it comes to weddings.
There was some drama getting to the reception location which I'll go into in the upcoming "driving in chicago" blog entry that got us there late, but somehow before most of the other people. There we met a friend of Mel's who had given up trying to find the ceremony and rather than showing up late, went straight to the reception hall. As things turned out, he and a few others in the same situation ended up spending about an hour and a half waiting for everyone to catch up.
Dinner was crazy. We'd been sitting around waiting for the bridal party to finish up their photos or whatever and start dinner when the bride came in and expressed her surprise that nobody was eating. Apparently, the instruction for the guests to start eating on arrival was lost somewhere in the chain. That pushed back the toasts which pushed back the cake cutting, which pushed back the dancing. The couple's first dance was to Ben Folds' The Luckiest, which I tend to think is one of the best songs ever for such a thing. As they finished that up, the clock struck midnight and it was time to go.
It was 2:00 by the time we got back to Julia's apartment, but that'll be covered in the driving entry.