My sister got married in a small, quiet mountain town. It was a lovely place for a wedding, but just wouldn’t do for a bachelorette, so we had decided to go farther afield for our wild times. Unfortunately, it was pouring rain, very dark, and the roads were mountainous, winding, and unfamiliar. This made me chicken, and I kind of wanted to call it off, but in the end we braved the awful roads and drove over an hour to Asheville. I drove, I should say, and though my sisters made fun of me for being slow and kind of herky jerky with my brakes, I would like it noted for the record that we did not burn up and die in a fiery auto crash, and so I don’t wanna hear any complaints.
We had a very good meal at Tupelo Honey Cafe, including wine and martinis (I cut myself off after 1 martini and a few sips of wine). We then headed out into the chilly, wet night for more fun . . . which was had. At a place. That was there. Shhhhh, bachelorette parties are supposed to be secret! All I’ll say is it involved a complimentary shot for the bride to be (imbibed, per instruction, hands-free), little dots of green lights, very bad karaoke, worse pool playing, and lots and lots of dancing. I drove us home and we were all tucked in bed at a semi-reasonable hour, and nobody was even hungover the next day, so I’d say it was successful! (Perhaps some might think that made it a failure, but I’m of the “Keep the bride from feeling and exhausted all weekend” school of thought.)
Friday morning I awoke not very refreshed or rested, as I’d once again shared a king bed with three male members of my family. Two of those males take up an extraordinarily large area of said bed, despite the fact that they are both less than half my height. In any case, though Jack slept in until extremely late, Liam (as per usual) was up before the sun, so his father and I blearily stumbled upstairs with him and tried to keep him alive. Given the layout of the cabin, this was not a super easy task – the stairs were open on one whole side, only blocked by couch placement. The kids loved to crawl all over the back of that couch, giving me frequent heart attacks. Anyway, the point is one could never relax up there with Liam on the loose, as potential deadly falls lurked around every corner.
I had heart attacks a lot that day, as Friday was a hang-around-the-house kind of day. We did some last minute stuff around the kitchen table – cutting autumn leaves for the table assignments, practicing the centerpiece designs. Midday we ladies left to have our nails done, and our mother came along with the mission to find mums as decorations. She deposited us at the nail place and took off on her search. A manicurist worked on the bride, absent mindedly (or perhaps on purpose?) filing one of her toe nails down to the quick. I heard all about the wonders of gel nails during my manicure. Because we suddenly found ourselves in a time crunch (running late for the rehearsal), at one point my middle sister had a manicurist doing her nails and a pedicurist removing polish from her feet at the same time. As those two were finishing up with her, our mother arrived, pleased as punch that she’d found great mums! On sale! They’re huge! They’ll look great! We paid up and piled out to the car, only to find that the car was so full of mums, there was no room left for us. . .
Mums in laps and bits of petals in our teeth, we showed up at the cabin several minutes later, with time travel being our only possible way of getting dressed up and to the rehearsal on time. The bride dashed through a shower and the rest of us dressed, and then we all sorted ourselves into a caravan which included the groom and his side as well (they were staying down the road). So everyone’s in this caravan together. The only member of the wedding party missing was a friend who would play violin – he drove separately, and was by this point already waiting for us at the rehearsal site. We started to drive along, and a few seconds down the road the lead car pulled over.
“Anybody know how to get there?” they asked. Oh dear . . .