So for those of you who didn’t go to Hawaii (or for those of you who did go and have forgotten about it already), I’ll start with the adventures before the wedding. I’ll spare you the little details of a bride going crazy (those stories are a dime a dozen anyway), but I will tell you that I was one of those neurotic, overplanning brides (for those of you who know me, that shouldn’t come as a shock at all), and I had even put together a database complete with a schedule of who is going to do what. The master list, printed out as a report, was about 28 pages, and I also had a secondary list that separated out the tasks by person, so each person only got about 1-2 pages.
Of course, since as my friend Grant put it to me, “Weddings are a series of catastrophes strung together,” the first catastrophe started when my in-laws decided not to go by the schedule. Now, they don’t know me very well, so I can kind of see how they would think this isn’t such a big deal. But it was, and it got me hopping mad on the day of my wedding rehearsal.
We all arrived, according to schedule, at the front of Waimea Falls Park at 11:15 AM, and it was pouring rain. Our wedding coordinator suggested we rehearse in the Butterfly Pavilion, our plan B in case of rain. I said, “Great, let’s go. Is everybody here?” We quickly realized that Ray’s parents weren’t there, and we then spent the next half hour trying to find them (calling the bungalows, trying to reach someone else at the bungalows), all of which was very hard because there’s not very much cell service at Waimea Falls.
Finally, when I’m about to say, “Okay, you know what? Let’s just do it without them,” one of the women working the front desk pipes up that she saw an elderly couple come in at about 10:30 and make their way to the Upper Meadow.
I then make the executive decision that we’re all going to go to the Butterfly Pavilion while Ray and the wedding coordinator get in the truck and drive to the Upper Meadow to get Ray’s parents. Of course, not five minutes have passed when who should come ambling down the hill in the rain? RAY’S PARENTS.
Oy. I could have torn my hair out. I should have figured that of all the people to not follow the schedule, it would be Ray’s parents, because A) they don’t realize how anal I actually am about schedules, and B) they always show up early when they’re not supposed to.
But all’s well that ends well. Ray returned with the wedding coordinator, we started the rehearsal (an hour late), and ran through everything without incident.
We then went back to the bungalows for our rehearsal BBQ (Ray didn’t want to have a rehearsal dinner; instead he thought just throwing some burgers on the grill would be sufficient).