Following breakfast Laila had to scamper off to the hotel, and I was left alone with my parents and my friend Kevin, who was staying at my parent's house with me. We hung around for awhile figuring out what everyone in my wedding party was doing. My best man Nick, and my three cousins Dave, Danny, and Russ, all ended up coming over to the house to get dressed in our tuxes with Kevin and I (Kevin was also one of my groomsmen). Only my groomsman Andy, who didn't have a lot of sleep that week, had to meet us at the church.
Once we arrived at St. George's Orthodox Cathedral we had some time to kill. The only other person at the church was Fr. Michael, and he was as usual tending to some business in the church office, so we kept to ourselves. The cathedral has a wall with plaques that remember parishioners who have passed away. I used to see the same names on the wall each Sunday, but looking at it that day drove home the point of how infrequently I'm there now that I live in Denver. In any event, people started filing in, and since it wasn't appropriate for Nick and myself to stand in the front of the church and just hang out and wave to people, we went into the altar. I was in the altar no more than two minutes when I got the first of many annoying requests from the photographer to come outside and take some pictures.
Once back in the altar, I was able to properly greet the other clergy who would partake in our Wedding ceremony, Bishop Basil, Fr. Romanos, and Dcn. Seraphim. It was a pleasure to see them all, and catch up, however briefly.
Before I knew it everyone had arrived and it was time for the ceremony to begin. Nick and I actually emerged from the altar late, as two of the groomsmen and bridesmaids had already arrived on the altar. Oops! But I was there in plenty of time to see my beautiful bride walk down the aisle. She looked exquisite in her gown, and I was glad to wait so long to be surprised by it.
The only hiccup in the ceremony was when Summer had to sit down from the heat. She's so cute, I wanted to sit down with her, it was so hot in the church. The church has an extremely high ceiling, and the air conditioner definitely wasn't turned on in time to cool the church sufficiently. Nevertheless, the ceremony continued unabated. The Orthodox ceremony is not like the typical ceremony we are used to seeing from Hollywood, but it is much more meaningful, rooted in our beliefs of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The ceremony took about 45-50 minutes, and then Summer and I walked back down the aisle as husband and wife.
We decided not to do a receiving line, because they are extremely awkward and we were worried it was going to start raining as well. After we walked back down the aisle, we sat down in the limo to quickly catch our breath. Then we headed back onto the church lawn to take pictures. We took bridal party pictures, family pictures, just us pictures, so many pictures. I was very concerned that it would start raining and ruin Summer's beautiful dress though. Once we were finally done with pictures, we hopped into the limo and he drove us the fifteen or so miles to the Indian Meadows Country Club, where we had our wedding reception extraordinaire. Right after Summer and I stepped inside, the sky opened up and it poured for a half hour. We got in just in time.
Once inside, we joined our bridal party in a room set off from the reception, where we enjoyed some appetizers and cocktails. Kevin gave a really nice, but brief toast, as did my mother, and then it was time to be introduced to our adoring public. Everyone filed in, announced by the DJ, Summer and I going last. Nick had us stay out on the dance floor while he gave the Best Man toast to the entire audience, and he did a fantastic job. He fooled everyone in the crowd when he said, "And I'd like to thank the two people who brought us here, without whom this event wouldn't be possible....the BARTENDERS!" That was funny. We mingled with people before and after dinner, making our way to every table. It was great so see everyone. We had people come from all parts of the world: lots of local people obviously, but also
Overall, the reception went off without a hitch. The DJ didn't have a real great music selection, but it was good enough to keep our drunk asses on the dance floor. We also got a brief set of Arabic music from Richie and Eddie, which was classic, almost everyone danced to it. The photographers, while annoying, did a good job. The flowers were good, because I never noticed them and the women loved them, which is exactly how flowers should be. And the food was tremendous, our host Kenny went out of his way to get us some of the juiciest prime rib I've ever had, and we got tons of compliments on it.
Once the reception was over, Summer and I changed and my dad whisked us off to the
When we got to the airport, I was stunned to see so many people in line so early in the morning. Good ole US Air. Fortunately, there was a separate line for flights to
Once on the ground, we went through customs, which wasn't too bad, and found the bus that we got with our package deal, set up by my cousin Lorrie, who's a great travel agent. I wasn't ready to truly relax until we got into our room. We had a momentary scare on check-in when they told us there were no king-side beds available in our room size, and that we would need to pay $50 a night extra to upgrade. After I explained to the woman at the front desk that we were honeymooners, the room that we were supposed to have magically appeared. Funny how that works.
We did a whole lot of nothing that Sunday, just hanging around in our room and resting. To be sure, most of the week followed that same pattern, hanging around in our room, at the pool, or on the beach. I didn't end up getting much of a tan, but Summer did because she already had a base tan. We had an all-inclusive package, so we ate all of meals at the hotel minus one dinner. The only other food we ate consisted of some popcorn when we went to see War of the Worlds, and some Haagen Daaz after said movie. The dinner we had outside of the hotel was at the Amazonia Steakhouse, which was incredible, I highly recommend that to everyone visiting
Other things we did in
The trip back was not much fun at all, between our delayed flight from Aruba, running through the Philadelphia airport to catch a connecting flight, our temporarily lost luggage, and finally our delayed flight out of Denver to Boston, which forced us to rely on a $70 cab ride rather than my friend Johnny to take us back to Centennial, but I don't want to dwell on the negative. I got to spend a wonderful week with my family, a wonderful week with just my baby, and in between I had the best wedding any man could ever hope to have. Amen.