This past weekend I went to a wedding, to see two friends of mine get married. This occurred, which is all well and good. However, I was hoping that the rest of the weekend would go without a hitch, or at least any additional hitching. Naturally, this was not to be the case.
Tom was the one driving me to the wedding, and his car was in the shop until the day before the wedding. Luckily, it was fixed in time, so we managed to drive up on the appropriate day with no problem, unless you include the requisite minor time-wasting of getting mildly lost, which I don't, because we didn't go far afield on the way up.
We arrived at the party the bridesmaids were throwing the day before the wedding, and got to see a bunch of old friends, which was very nice. We chatted about silliness happily, and discussed when the rest of our friends would be showing up. A couple whom Tom and I had agreed to share a hotel room with had yet to show up, so I wondered if I wouldn't see them until that evening. Then I heard someone say that they were arriving by train the following morning.
This struck me as odd given that we were sharing the room that night, but I decided perhaps they had booked for two nights and somehow been delayed so they would miss the first one. I graciously offered their half of the room to a friend who would otherwise have had to drive a half hour to stay with relatives. About an hour later, after overhearing more conversation, it somehow came to my attention that the couple had not reserved a room for tonight at all, but only for the following night.
Surely, I thought, there has been some mistake. Doesn't everyone stay over the night before the wedding? How could they have reserved a room for the wrong night? I clearly wanted a room for the night before the wedding, not after, and they must not have specified in their emails.* Tom and I were suddenly roomless. We told the friend I had offered a room to that our room had disappeared. Anyway, I figured Tom and I would just call the hotel and get our own room, not too big a deal. And I'm sure it wouldn't have been, had the hotel not already been booked up.
Luckily, our occasionally omnipresent lanky friend and his girlfriend were kind enough to let Tom and I stay in their hotel room. I got the couch, Tom got the cushions. We went to the wedding the following day, which was a somewhat religious ceremony. Naturally, I wasn't as familiar with the responses as most of the Catholic crowd. And I didn't know the tunes to the hymns, although I tried to sing a low baseline to one, which my lanky friend pointed out was obnoxious in retrospect.
The ceremony was so religious that the priest even came to the reception and gave a speech there, blessing the after-party and saying something about how the presence of Jesus has made every party more enjoyable since biblical times. Now that I believe-- who wouldn't want someone at their party who could turn water into wine? I can just see all the waiters bringing pitchers of water over to him. What I wonder is whether people would want their dinner rolls turned into fish or not.
Regardless, the party ended and Tom and I drove home, after asking 4 people numerous times for directions. We were originally planning to spend the night in Tom's hometown, but we somehow missed a crucial exit, and by the time we could go east again, we were an hour north of where we should have been. Luckily, Tom is a sensible man, and declared that we would drive back to Williamstown that night instead, thus turning what could have been an hour of wasted driving in the wrong direction into a clever shortcut in the right direction. He has a theory of directional driving that ignores specific roads and routes in favor of generally saying, "Go Northeast, young man."
Horace Greeley, eat your heart out.