The Restoration Tour

Waking up this morning after having our “wedding” last night was actually a bit bizarre.  Not in a bad way.  As the fog of sleep began to wear away, and thoughts began to emerge, I felt a deep sense of joy and contentment.  It was just weird to be waking up in our own house in our own bed like any normal day.

Of course, we already took the honeymoon last week, so here we are, with everything new, and everything the same as well.  It feels wonderful, and there’s definitely a tingle in the air, but not having anywhere to go, or anything specific that comes next is a little bit strange after a year of being so focused on this.

Please don’t get me wrong.  We had a wonderful week at Big Cedar, and our vow renewal ceremony was joyous and fun and everything we dreamed of.  The last 6 days have been some of the most amazing and fulfilling I’ve ever experienced.

The heat wave kept us either in our room (which is an extremely nice place to be kept, thank you very much), or at the pools and lazy river for most of our honeymoon.  Triple digit temperatures and Missouri humidity don’t exactly encourage outside activity, but fortunately, there’s plenty of water to get into at the resort, and we did.  We got much more sun-tanned there in 5 days than we did during a week in California.

Yesterday morning, we were up at 4:30 AM for the Tour de Cox, an annual 62 mile (100km) bike ride.  The clouds kept the temperature reasonable, and we really enjoyed the ride.  We finished up a little before noon after getting started about 6, so we had a few hours to rest and recover before the ceremony.  Out of town company was arriving throughout the day, and most of the afternoon was a blur.

My wife wore her orange “poofy” dress (no other way to describe it) with lots of fun pink and orange accessories, and I dressed as the Mad Hatter.  We ordered the actual hat online, but nothing else was authentic.  It was a Mad Hatter/Alice in Wonderland theme, but we did it in our own unique way.

Late in the afternoon, we took casual pictures in the park, then had the reception before the ceremony as the guests began to arrive.  It was meant to keep it from having a stuffy, formal, traditional wedding feel and allow everyone to relax, loosen up, and enjoy themselves.  Interestingly enough, there had been a wedding at the same park earlier in the day, and it seemed that it had been very formal and probably quite expensive.  While I certainly wish that couple well, we had several people tell us that ours was the best and most fun wedding they had ever gone to.

For the ceremony itself, we simply had a few songs played that were meaningful to us (we tried to dance, but couldn’t manage to keep from stepping all over my wife’s dress, so we had to cut that mercifully short), had three people (our oldest daughter and two close friends) say a few words, and then we stood and said our vows, which we wrote ourselves, to each other.

Oh….yeah…. and then I did the futterwacken dance from the new Tim Burton Alice In Wonderland movie, much to everyone’s shock and delight!  My wife said some special “thank you’s” and handed out roses to some of the guests and then we hung around with everyone for a little while.  It was pretty much perfect, and it was so amazing to have envisioned this day a year before and then see it come to pass.

I have a few surprises left for the blog, so if you are thinking this is the last entry, you’re not quite correct.  The main one is that we’ve decided to drop the anonymity and some of the secrecy now that the ceremony is over.  I am going to go back through the posts and add some pictures and reveal some more of who we really are that has been missing up to now.  I also have some other thoughts, but you’ll have to wait and see on those…  For now, thank you so much for reading and sharing – it means more than you know!