A Winter "Beach" Wedding

It's been a while since we've done anything mildly interesting, so I figure attending a winter "beach" wedding is worth mentioning.

Originally, Alex was going to be a groomsman in this wedding, but a potential conflict came up a few months ago, and he decided to respectfully bow out rather than leave someone hanging at the last minute.  Instead, we thought we'd make it into a bit of a "babymoon," but then after our exhaustingly long drive the day before, we didn't have much energy to put into dragging this trip out.  It was, however, nice to do something different, and having an excuse to get dolled up didn't hurt either.  ;)

The wedding party was pretty average sized (7 attendants total), but the chapel they chose was WAY too small for the 325 guests that attended.  (We barely managed to grab the very last two seats in the room!)  Additionally, the reception was held in the bride's backyard, so an announcement was made after the ceremony that people needed to leave their cars there and take trolley shuttles to the reception due to lack of parking (way to prepare people...).  Let's just say fearing porta potty lines, lack of seating, and the possibility of running out of food made this 31 week pregnant lady pretty nervous to say the least!

However, I was pleasantly surprised to find huge enclosed tents with adequate seating, a hot chocolate bar (yay, something for me while Alex enjoyed the beer), no lack of food, and "high end" porta potties (with lines to wait in the 40 degree cold, which I still think is pretty tacky, but whatever). We enjoyed the opportunity to have a night out, just the two of us.  And, you can't really argue with a nice dinner and decent entertainment, can you?  It's too bad we didn't know anyone to hang out with and make a party out of it, though.

Purple Sweet Potato Butter?
That will be interesting!

We peeled out pretty early (around 8:30 p.m.) and returned to the motel to enjoy television in bed, which is always a real treat for us.  Alex watched football, I perused the internet on my phone, letting ourselves start to catch up on some much-needed rest. The next morning, we took a minute to visit the beach, since we were on an island after all.  Of course, 35 degrees is way too cold to spend any real enjoyable time out there, so we snapped a few pictures and then went on our way!

Baby's first trip to the beach! 

On our way to Mass, we killed time by stopping at a few grocery stores in hopes of finding some jar roux to use in making gumbo for his parents, but no luck.  People had no idea what roux was, so despite the stores selling plenty of Zatarain's and Tony Chachere's brand products, roux was not one of those.  The gumbo will have to wait!

And finally, we enjoyed Mass before heading out of town, and then stopped to have Bojangles (!!!) for lunch on our way back to Alex's dad's house.  I have to say, one of my favorite parts of traveling is attending Mass at churches across the country.  We always keep a copy of the bulletin and add it to our collection to a scrapbook of sorts.  It's cool to look back on all the places we visit over the years.

What about you - do you have any interesting travel traditions as it relates to visiting churches on your trip?

-Lauren